If it makes a difference - it shouldn’t - I’m on a Mac. I just don’t seem to be able to figure out how to handle US census data in RM9. I can create the source for the specific year in question, and can create a citation for one person. But I do not see how to share that same source and citation with the other members of the family. I’ve looked at the help files and can find no useful information. I’ve looked in the RM9 book - nothing useful is there. I’ve checked the RM videos and the only one that even talks about the census is from RM5! I would hope that improvements have been made since then. I’m a new RM user but handling sources and citations is certainly not intuitive, especially when compared to other Mac apps. Can someone please point me in the right direction, if possible without technical jargon.
One place with more discussions about such is here in the forums. Search in all topics and posts via the magnifying glass in upper right corner. Just saying.
If you take a look at the following video Bruce demonstrates an example of memorising and pasting a citation in a 10 minute section starting at about time 41:50.
(1) Sources, Citations, and Documentation in RootsMagic 8 - YouTube
The video is for RM 8 but it works the same in version 9.
Another point. Reading between the lines I am wondering if you are looking for a special tool which specifically handles entering data from a census schedule. I noted in another post that you have used Heredis. It does provide an elementary tool to enter Census data for an entire family group at the same time. Rootsmagic does not have an equivalent tool. AFAIK most desktop genealogical tools do not. Family Historian does not have that facility either, but it is supplemented by a user developed companion tool called Ancestral Sources which does aid with source driven data entry.
Thank you for this and your previous post. I definitely was looking to add census information for an entire family at the same time. I don’t see how census information about who is the head, spouse, son, daughter, etc. is entered in RM. Sure would be helpful, at least for me, for a video to be made about entering census information into RM. The whole process seems to be so clunky.
It does seem clunky if you are accustomed to having a tool to aid with entering all of the data in one pass. The best solution is to develop a manual workflow or checklist to follow with each census family. Create a citation, memorize it. Then go through each census entry creating persons and events as appropriate and paste memorised citation links as you go. It is not as bad as it sounds once a workflow is established.
There are two separate but related issue that may being conflated because of your experience with Heredis.
Issue #1 is simply to ignore sources and citations for the moment and to ask how you enter Census facts in RM9. There are two basic ways. The first way is to enter a separate Census fact for each family member. The second way is to enter a Census fact for the head of household and then to share that Census fact with each family member. What is actually being shared is not the Census fact per se, but rather roles for the Census fact such as Wife, Son, Daughter, Mother, Father, etc. These roles do not exist by default in RM9’s Fact Type list and you have create them. But you only have to do so once and having created them you can use them again for any number of families.
Issue #2 then is how to enter citations. If you go with a separate Census fact for each family member, then you create a citation for the head of household and Memorize it. Then you Paste that citation to the separate Census fact for each family member. If you go with roles for the Census fact for which roles are shared with the various family members, all you have to do is add a citation to the head of household. Having done so, the same citation is applied automatically to each shared role for all the other family members.
The shared role approach is surely easier, faster, and more user friendly than using a separate Census fact for each family member. The only downside with the shared role approach is that RM’s shared roles typically are not exported to genealogy software such as FamilySearch and Ancestry that do not support shared roles.
The shared census event is a great solution but it is one piece or what Heredis covers. Heredis will also create other facts based on other data captured from the census return. These may include occupation, nationality, religion, race, and maybe others I cannot remember. It also will allow for the creation of citation links to the (estimated) birth and name (and marriage?) facts. While the shared census event will certainly help, it will not cover those scenarios. So Herb would still have to handle those manually if he wanted to record and cite those facts in the same way based on the census record. It really comes down to how much detail one wishes to explicitly extract and cite from the census source.