Add birth fact to all members of a tree?

RootsMagic
1

Hi, As everyone has a birthdate, is there a way of adding this fact to all of the tree members,Please? Thanks

2

Everyone is born … but in a lot of old records the actual birthdate is unknown and/or not recorded, often in these cases all you have is a baptized date!
[Same can apply to Death Date when all you have is a Burial Date]

3

RM does not support bulk adding a fact to every person, neither the Birth fact nor any other fact.

RM’s database is an SQLite database. Bulk operations such as bulk additions of facts can be done via SQLite scripts. Doing so usually requires programming skills and can be fraught if there are bugs in the script. Doing so is not supported or recommended by RM support. If you choose this route, you will be on your own or possibly assisted by other RM users. You can learn more about using SQLite with RM at SQLite Tools for RootsMagic

I have programming skills and I am fluent in using SQLite scripts with RM. I also have many individuals in my RM database without Birth facts. However, for this particular problem I’m choosing to add all the Birth facts by hand, one at a time. I can’t picture any good general way to generate birth dates for the Birth facts, even estimated birth dates. And it seems to me that a Birth fact without a birth date is no better than no Birth fact at all. For example, you can do an Advanced Search in RM for Birth => Date => Is Blank and it will return both individuals who have no Birth fact and individuals with a Birth fact which has a blank date.

4

… which is tantamount to saying a Birth event with no date is equivalent to having no Birth fact! But the Fact List report works differently from your Advanced Search query: it omits those having blank Birth events because it tests for the presence of the Birth event. The corresponding Advanced Search criterion is:
Birth => exists => is False

5

I’ve seen such enhancement requests repeated over many years without action from developers and usually some debate among users about their usefulness. What’s your argument in favour of this feature?

Likewise, there have been related requests to batch add Birth events to those having a Christening or Baptism event or to batch copy an event to a group of people. I’ve developed a couple of SQLite queries as Jerry has described that demonstrated the feasibility of such features but they’ve not been taken up by the RM developers. There’s always hope!

Births – Add from Christening or Baptism
Copy Fact to Group

1 Like
6

Thnaks Tom, please would you be willing to share your coding? Thanks, Phil

7

Scripts are on the pages I linked.

1 Like
8

Just from the way you made that request, I am going to guess you have little or no experience using SQL to tickle databases. Since you are going to be altering your database using a third party tool, you will most definitely want to make sure to back up your database file before altering it in any way. You should also spend a day or three reading over the SQLite Tools page that Jerry linked.

1 Like
9

Thanks Tom, sorry misread.