Can I highlight or bold a direct line ancestor:

RootsMagic
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1

I would like to bold or highlight each person in my direct line in RootsMagic. Is this possible?

2

Not automatically. Best you can do is color code them.

1 Like
3

Since I don’t use the Prefix field, I’ve been placing a ☆ character there for direct line folks. It’s only a visual clue (like your bolding or highlighting would be) but looks “okay” in reports and is visible in the Person Index. However, with the announcement of a new Associations feature in RM9, I’ve been considering enhancing that scheme with an actual fact (one I also never use) the Caste fact …whose fact sentence is also based on “association”.:
[person] was associated with [Desc]< [Date]>< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>.
I’m thinking maybe change sentence grammar from “was” to “is”, fill the Description field with “the direct line of Xxxx Y Zzzz” or something like that.

4

When I started building my family tree in Ancestry, I decided to enter all my direct ancestors in UPPER CASE. It has worked well for me both in Ancestry and Roots Magic, whenever I see a name I can tell immediately if the person is an ancestor. It might not be a great approach if I wanted to create book-like reports though.

5

Other than color coding “ancestors of” your 16 main lines (after which you won’t have enough colors to do another generation), doing the prefix/suffix symbol thing, upper case thing, or you could put something in the pic window area. If you already have people pics there, you can maybe modify the pic to have a yellow border around it and reupload it. That’s if you want visuals. If you just want a list, you could create a group.

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6

Since you seem to be new to RM, and to expand on what TomH said: You can’t “highlight” a person directly. But you can create a Group consisting of your direct ancestors (there’s a built-in shortcut to do that for groups), then color-code the group. Of course, you can this for any other definable group, too: in Revolutionary War veterans, adoptees, people born in Germany, people with brick walls – whatever you find useful.

Anyway, all your ancestors (or whoever) will then have a colored bar at the left-hand margin – so pick a bright color! I wish the color code could be in the form of a solid block forming the background of the name, but no.