I am tryign to copy census facts from parents to children. If the census fact is not a census family fact, the window opens and I can choose others and it works very cleanly.
If it is a family fact, the explorer window opens for us to select the marriage that this person belongs to. But when I select the correct marriage and close the Edit window, when I check the other children, the census fact has not been copied.
Is this a bug or I am doing something wrong? It makes me never wan to us census family facts, since they seem to only save you to time to copy to a spouse.
Think of it this way. You cannot copy a Marriage fact to one of the children. It wouldn’t make any sense. Census (family) is like a Marriage fact.
The difference goes deeper than just that you cannot copy a Census (family) fact to the children. Consider just the parents and consider narrative reports. In narrative reports, there is a list of individual facts for the father/husband like Birth, Death, and Burial. There is a list of individual facts for the mother/wife like Birth, Death, and Burial. And there is a third list of facts for the couple, things like Marriage and Divorce. It really makes much more sense to me that Census facts be individual, separate for the husband and wife so that the Census facts will be in their list of individual facts in reports along with Birth, Death, and Burial.
We see the Marriage fact all the time in RM’s Edit Person screen mixed in with the individual facts for the person such as Birth, Death, and Burial. But that view of the Marriage fact is a convenient and useful fiction. The Marriage fact really does not belong to either person as an individual. It only belongs to the couple as a whole. It’s almost like the couple is a small two person business, and certain things like Marriage facts belong to the business, not to the two owners of the business as individuals.
Yep, the Mark as Family feature in RM11 makes it much easier than it has ever been before in RM to enter a Census fact for one family member and then to copy the Census fact from that family member to all the other family members. Or if you prefer entering Census using RM’s Shared Facts feature, the Mark as Family feature makes it much easier than it has ever been before to enter a Census fact for one family member and then to share the Census fact for that family member with all the other family members.
My personal workflow for Census is now to enter a Census fact for the head of household and then to copy that census fact to all the other family members using the new Mark as Family feature in RM11. It’s the best new feature that has appeared in RM for many, many years.
I can’t think of any scenario where using the Census (family) fact makes much sense to use, for reasons I described in my earlier message. Many years ago, the RM developers mentioned that they included it in RM only because it was supported in GEDCOM and that RM needed to be able to support all the standard GEDCOM fact types.
I find that to be true for me. Although when I first came to RM – I was excited only to be disappointed that it was just couple like marriage – at least resident make some sense.
Thanks to you all for explaining this rather well. I have to say it doesnt make a fan of Census Family Fact. Its not intuitive. Please tell me how I access this Mark as Family feature. If I select a fact and right click to copy, the box shown above does not appear.
When You right-click an INDIVIDUAL fact, then choose Copy Fact, the window that opens has two buttons named Mark and Unmark plus an index list of all individuals by name. Clicking either Mark or Unmark brings up the dropdown window that Families is at the top of. Right-click a FAMILY fact and there’s no Mark or Unmark buttons.
You all are so awesome. Thank you for walking me through finding the Mark Families. That is going to save me hours and hours of time copying census records. I appreciate that you all share your time to help us use and understand Rootsmagic better.
