ORA Templates

ORA - Online Repository Assistant - is a tool that will retrieve the content off displayed web pages and save it into a 'Control Panel', from where you can either manually Cut'n'Paste the content into the relevant fields in a Family Historian Property Box, Citation pane, etc, or use the simple scripting language to automate the data extraction to save hours of typing, and giving you a consistant format for your records and the source/citation.

If you have not seen or used it before, please visit https://www.ora-extension.com/en/contents.htm which are the author of ORA, John Cardinal's web pages for the latest demos and technical information. I am not going to delve into it here, as the objective of this set of webpages is to show what I have done so far, and make available my templates that I use with Family Historian to help others 'get started'!

I am an avid user of Family Historian(FH) and have been since its version 3 in 2005/6, and have upgraded through all the releases to the latest version 7.n.n Over the last 16 or more years, my main or master gedcom has grown from approx 6,000 individuals to over 180,000 individuals, with 5000 plus sources and over 400,000 citations. I began entering my sources as a 'lumper', ie an Ancestry 'collection' and multiple citations of that 'collection', and I attach images to the citation, not the source, as 'Generic Sources'.

With version 7.0 of Family Historian, they introduced Templated Source mechanisms and Data Entry Assistants(DEA) written as plugins, working on the 'splitter' methodology. I decided to not go that route, but to keep to the Generic source methods and implement ORA. ORA cannot do everything that DEA's are capable of achieving, as it is dependant on knowing the keyboard shortcuts within Family Historian to navigate FH, and unfortunately FH do not have keyboard shortcuts for everything, and 'mouse' interventions are necessary. You could use ORA to populate the FH templates in the Essentials Collections, etc, prior to running the 'DEA' plugin associated with that template. All my templates are written to operate on my FH Configurations as per the topic below.

I do export my family trees from Family Historian and import them into TNG on a regular basis, and have not found an issue with the ORA templated results. see my website www.1820Settlers.com

Please be aware that the templates listed on this website may not be my most current, as I am constantly finding new or better ways to write the templates, and John Cardinal is constantly improving the features of ORA. They are a working guideline!

Created by Paul Tanner-Tremaine