Genealogy: Family Tree Maker to CKK
Family Tree Maker is a popular desktop software for the creation and management of family trees. The program allows you to store biographical data such as birth, marriage, and death dates and locations, as well as capture complex familial relationships, among other things. Kwusen has recently developed a Community Member importer that facilitates the rapid transfer of extensive genealogical datasets from Family Tree Maker files to your Community KnowledgeKeeper (CKK). By importing family trees from Family Tree Maker to the CKK, you can preserve vital genealogical research for the community and their relations. Adding these records to your secure CKK database not only protects this data, but enriches the information already stored there.
Family Tree Maker tree view for Clara Louisa Carr.
Each individual from the imported family tree will become a Community Member in your CKK. Those individuals in the Family Tree Maker file that already exist as Community Member profiles in your CKK can be merged.
Community Members in the CKK created as part of a Family Tree Maker import.
Upon import, individuals’ given names, surnames, nicknames, titles, and suffixes listed in Family Tree Maker will be brought over into their corresponding fields in the CKK Community Member profile. The same is true for the locations and dates of important life events such as birth, marriage, and death. Text from the Research Notes and Person Notes fields in Family Tree Maker can also be brought into the Follow Up Notes section of a Community Member’s profile.
The profile of an imported Community Member in CKK.
As part of the work to increase the CKK’s compatibility with Family Tree Maker data, Kwusen developed and implemented a new flexible date system. This system is capable of capturing the variances found in the Family Tree Maker database. These variances can include partial dates (i.e., only month and year), date ranges (i.e., bet. 1 Jan 1900 - 31 March 1901), approximate dates (i.e., abt. 1900), and before or after dates (i.e., bef. 1900, aft. 1900).
Perhaps the most valuable part of the new importer is its capacity to replicate all of the complex relationships assigned in the Family Tree Maker software. These include not just the relationships themselves, but the many possible types between couples (i.e., married vs. separated, etc.), and between parents and children (i.e., biological vs. adopted, etc.). The CKK’s intricate relationship system preserves the many facets of relationships that might be found in Family Tree Maker files. In the CKK, these relationships are represented in the Family section of each Community Member profile page.
The ‘Family’ section of a Community Member profile in CKK.
Kwusen recently conducted extensive genealogical research for one of our clients, resulting in the creation of a substantial tree in Family Tree Maker. By employing the new importer, Kwusen was able to efficiently transfer this family tree to the client’s CKK, creating Community Member profiles for the tree’s nearly 1,400 individuals and migrating the corresponding metadata to each one.
Do you have a Family Tree Maker database that you would like to migrate to CKK? Please reach out to the research team at support@kwusen.ca if so! We can also assist with genealogical research, including archival research and interviews.
