I am trying to improve data quality in my RootsMagic 11 tree by identifying ancestors who have no sources or very few sources attached. I would like to generate a report, list, or search result showing:
Individuals with zero sources, and
Individuals with fewer than X sources (e.g., fewer than 2 or 3).
I’ve looked through the “Search,” “Find Everywhere,” and “Problem Search” tools, but I haven’t found a clear way to create a targeted list sorted by the number of sources per person.
Is there a built-in method, custom report, or criteria-based search that will allow me to produce this list? And if so, could you outline the exact steps?
The exact kind of search you are looking for is not supported. There are two particular problems with what is supported as compared to what you are looking for.
You can look for Person records or Fact records with or without sources. But there is not a way to search based on counts of the records. For example, you can find Birth facts with 0 sources or with more than 0 sources. But you can’t find Birth facts with less than 3 sources,
There is no search criteria that aggregates the count of sources for a whole person. So you can’t search for people with less then 5 sources overall, where “overall” means for the person record and the family and all the facts.
You can, however, search for specific data associated with sources. For example, you could search for Birth > Fact > Exists AND Source > Footnote > Does not contain > certificate to find Birth sources that were not birth certificates.
You might need to be creative in your searches, because many of your searches might be for time-frames when certain kinds of documents didn’t exist. For example, I look for birth dates between 1908 and 1912 in Tennessee when there was no source that was a birth certificate because that was an early period when Tennessee did require birth certificates. What it amounts to is that you are going to have to be more targeted in looking for lists of missing or poor sources than just looking at counts,
I would love to get a report of person records without sources (even without the count). Will that give me one of the reports I’m looking for, i.e., persons without any sources, and if so, how can I do that?
I did another search for individuals without a source for death date because if there is no source for the death date, it is probably close to what I’m looking for, and that is individuals who are poorly documented or not documented at all. Let me know what you think about that as a workaround unless there is a way to get the direct report I want.
What is the “individual source” field? I did a search for individual attributes with the "individual source” as “does not exist.” But I found individuals who do have a source in the results so I guess it’s not the filter I was looking for.
Some of what you want may be available if you have an Ancestry tree and pay extra to use their ‘pro tools’ tree checker. Like everything else Ancestry charge extra for this but as a taster it throws up 3 individuals a week free - you just need to click on the button that shows your ‘tree score’. Works well for merging duplicates too, most of which were created by Ancestry in the first place! Having said that ‘pro tools’ also gives enhanced DNA matching tools plus reports, charts, etc.
You could create a group for each fact type like what BobC describes – then combine the groups using OR criteria for multiple facts (Birth/Death/Burial/Draft/Census and so on)
You could run the Fact List report, List Type = Facts w/out Sources, Include=Everyone. Then save as excel and create a pivot table using Name for the rows and Count of Events as the value. This will give you a list of people that you can quickly sort from highest to lowest by the Num of facts missing sources.
The Fact List report will also let you generate lists of people missing key facts such as birth or death, which might be of interest but wouldn’t get called out in the above query.
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