To help me concentrate my further research on specific groups within my database I have utilised three of RM’s tools to create the following structure :
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I have set up three separate groups – my paternal line direct ancestors, my maternal line ancestors and, thirdly, collateral ancestors including related by marriage.
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I have created a colour coding set which uses these groups. I have coloured paternal ancestors blue, maternal ancestors red and collateral ancestors green.
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I have run the Set Relationships tool with myself as the start person. For those individuals who RM identifies as being related to me, this generates a description of their connection to me.
By using this three-step process I can visually identify where individual people fit into my family tree, including those collateral people who fall outside RM’s definition of kinship such as the grandparents, parents and siblings of the spouses of my aunts and uncles etc, Unsurprisingly, I have substantially more “green” people than are listed in RM’s Kinship Report but, for me at least, that’s fine because they’re still people of interest.
In practice of course, when adding new individuals into the database, it’s necessary to (1) refresh my three groups, then (2) re-apply the colour coding to each group in turn, and (3) re-run the Set Relationships tool. Only when I’ve gone through all three steps can I be sure I’ve fully updated everyone in the way I want.
This all gives rise to a question which I’ve tagged here as a possible feature request.
Feature request :
Would it be possible for RM 10 to have some form of user-defined “macro” functionality? So, instead of having to separately run each of the three steps I’ve referred to above, one after the other, RM could memorise them once and I would then just need to run the macro to go through all three update steps. This way would be quicker, easier, and help to get things done in the right order.
Another place I can see this approach being useful would be to combine the four File Tools – integrity, indexes etc – into one.
Does anyone have any thoughts or comments to add?