Is there a way to add a particular fact type to a group of people in one step? Here is an example for its use: With the 1950 US Census about to be released, I want to prepare for it by adding a “Census” fact type to those in my RM8 database who are affected. Rather than open the page of each person affected by that census Census and manually adding that fact type to their individual page, I would like to create a group of all people in my data base who were alive in 1950 and then add the blank fact type to everyone in the group in one step. (I will use the Search function to create the 1950 Census Group.) It would save hundreds of keystrokes. I could also use such a feature to add an occupation and a residence fact to everyone in the 1950 census group as well. Then, when I search the census records in Ancestry or FamilySearch and find the new census records, the blank fact records (census, residence, occupation, etc.) would be ready for data entry. I can think of other fact types to add en masse to a group.
By the way, I know how to add fact type templates on the “Add Person” screen for a new person. This suggestion is for existing persons who would all need a particular existing or new fact type.
Assuming that what you are asking for was indeed possible and you added Occupation and Residence facts to all the people who were supposedly alive in 1950 this does not guarantee that you will actually be able to find all such people and you will thus be left with lots of entered facts with no citations. Have you actually found ALL the people in ALL the censuses that they should be enumerated in? I certainly haven’t.
The answer to your question is “no”. RM does not support that sort of bulk add of facts.
To Terry – Yes, I thought that one through and have ways to mitigate the number of “blank” facts.
To both Terry & Jerry – Thanks for your response. I figured that was the case, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
The bulk add can be done outside of RM using SQLite in case you are interested in more information about that approach.
Jerry, Thanks for the suggestion. It has been a couple of decades since I used SQL so I would probably burn more time figuring it out than manually entering the Facts. Btw, I have seen a number of your responses to RM8 questions from the RootsMagic community. Thanks so much for your insights. Several have been helpful to me.
I would like such a feature but not in the way you envision it. I’d like to select a group of people (nuclear family say) and create a fact type like residence and populate it with a date, place, and address and (really dreaming here) source citation.
Thus I could add the 1950 census I have found to the entire family living there and have it sourced all in one go.
I think there are two separate issues. One issue is to be able to bulk add a fact to a very large group of people, even up to everybody in the database. There is an SQLite way to do so, but no way within RM itself. The SQLite way sort of has a problem of where to copy the fact from, which is why it might tend to involve creating a dummy person to contain the fact to be copied. If this could be done from within RM itself, I would think you would just add the fact to a real person and then tell RM to copy that fact to other people. I don’t think you would need a dummy person to contain the fact to be copied.
The other issue is as you suggest to be able to copy (not share!) the same fact to multiple family members such as to all the family members in the same census enumeration.
In all truth, if this feature was actually available within RM itself, it would probably just need to be one feature and wouldn’t need to be two separate features. You would just need an easy way to specify the list of people where the fact should be copied. For “all family members”, it would need to be easier than having to make a group, but copying a fact to all members of a group should also be supported.
Why not a copy/paste as is done with sources? Select the event, copy, select the source, copy. Open the next person add copied event, add copied source.
I would hope that copying the event would include the source and the media for the event without any extra copying.
Thanks, Beverly. That is an excellent idea, and it has a precedent in citations for either copying the fact exactly (citations and all) or pasting it in with the option to edit. I know the Share option would do the same for all members of a single family in the census. But the copy fact idea would be helpful if a lot of relatives live in the same home town.