I am looking for two features in the Descendant List Report function.
I want to generate a report with ONLY deceased people included - not living people.
2)I want to generate a report in which the Notes for each person would be added to the report. If the Notes for a person are blank, then nothing would be shown for that person; if the Notes are non-blank, they would be printed underneath the name and dates for that person.
Is there a way for me to do that myself, or is that strictly a Development implementation? I thought about “Custom Reports”, but they seem to be organized only by last name, not as a tree.
Custom reports are organized like a spreadsheet - one line per person. There is no tree structure at all. They would probably be better called “spreadsheet reports” or something in that vein.
The additional functionality you need in the Descendant List would need to be request from a new RM feature or enhancement.
Could you fake out a narrative report to do something like it by disabling narrative output for all fact types except maybe Birth and Death for which you might want to disable Description? Iirc, I don’t think you can suppress Notes for selected fact types so you might have the Birth and Death Notes along with Person (General) Notes.
Thank you for the suggestion. I did try generating a Narrative Report, which can include Notes for each person; so, that satisfies the need for a tree-ordered report with Notes included. What it lacks is a means to just check a box that says “deceased only”. I can limit the number of generations, but that still leaves people in the list who are still alive. Will require a Feature upgrade to RM8 to be able to do that.
Does the Descendant List report have that option? I could envision suppressing the info for living persons but exclusion from the line means the line has to stop at their parent, omitting the living person and their deceased descendants.
No, the Descendant List does not have that option. The only option for exerting some control over the output is the number of generations to be included.
I thought as much. If you’re happy enough with the narrative then I can think of three ways to get closer to what you want, all workarounds:
Export the database with the option to privatize living people. Import that GEDCOM file and run the report from there.
Color-code living people red. Generate narrative, save as DOCX, edit in Word using its special search/replace feature to find red text and replace with underscores.
Use SQLite on a copy of the database to bulk delete or bulk rename living people. Run report.
Just to let you know what happened (maybe you were expecting this, but I wasn’t)…When I said to privatize living people, RM created a GED file with EVERYONE included. The result was that their name was replaced with the string “LIVING”, but, otherwise, all of their details, such as birth date, birthplace, etc. were STILL in the report. Those people’s private information was still in the report.
I haven’t tried the color-coding technique, but it would be a large effort, especially to remove the facts about those people.
I am not familiar with the use of SQLite, so I will not try to do that.
Thanks for thge suggestions, though.
So you have a couple of choices, and I am ruling out other software because I am unaware of any genealogy software that will clip living persons in a descendant list as it runs quite contrary to what a descendant list does. Choice one, the color code thing that @TomH mentioned or drag the root individual and descendants to a new database and prune the living and then generate your list and edit it accordingly. By root person, I mean the root of the report, not of your file.
OK, then a variant on the theme is to omit the living people thus fracturing the tree. Create a named group:
Mark the descendants of the selected person (not one by one, there’s a list of descendant criteria for batch marking)
Unmark those whose Living fact is true.
Save the named group.
Export, selecting from People to include the named group.
Then import to a new database and generate the narrative report as described earlier.
It’s a very difficult problem that doesn’t have a very good solution.
I have not tried reporting solutions but I have tried GEDCOM solutions because I like to transfer my RM data to GedSite software using GEDCOM. I have a few sad situations where a young child has died within the last dozen years or so and the child’s parents and grandparents are still living. No matter what I do, it seems I can’t in any practical way publish the deceased child’s information publicly that doesn’t disclose too much information about the child’s parents or grandparents because I include all my sources when I transfer data to GedSite and my data includes things like transcriptions of obituaries. So the data and sources for the deceased child discloses information about the living parents and grandparents.
I don’t think your are going to be happy with the solutions offered by RM or any of its competitors because the problem is so difficult. Let me ask a question in return. Suppose you were using a word processor rather than a genealogy program to produce your descendant report? Exactly how you would like the report to appear? Exactly how would you connect the deceased person to the rest of the report when there was a missing generation or two that couldn’t be printed because they were still living?
For example, would you include the names of the living individuals and omit all their other data? Or would you describe the names of the living individuals as Living and omit all their other data?
Once you have made those decisions, and assuming you wanted to include at least something for the missing generations, here’s what I think you would need to do in RM or any other genealogy software. Make a second copy of you RM database. Call it a reporting database. Change the names of all your living people to Living and delete all their facts. Keep the names and facts for people who are deceased. Then run your report. That’s the only thing that I think is going to come close close to doing what you want.