I’m trying to prepare a printed list of marriages to take with me as a to do list to a courthouse that is about an hour from my house. I want to get the actual courthouse marriage records. I don’t do this much any more because so many courthouse marriage records are online, but these particular records are not online and all I have are index records. I have created a group of the people for whom I need to get the courthouse marriage records.
It seems like an easy report to create, but apparently it isn’t. What I need for each person in the group is the name of person, the name of each spouse, the marriage date for each spouse, and the marriage place for each spouse.
The Marriage List report does not support filtering by group.
The Individual List report includes the name of the spouse but it does not include the marriage date and place.
The Individual Summary report can include all the needed information, but it produces a separate piece of paper for each person in the group.
A Custom Report can be created that almost works. And for anybody in the group who only has one spouse, it works perfectly. But for individuals in the group who who have more than one spouse, it lists all the spouses but only lists the marriage place and date for the first spouse.
I have few enough people in the group that my workaround will be to run the Custom report even though it has a bit of missing information. Then I will hand write the missing information on the report before going courthouse.
Because I’m keeping my RM7 database in sync with my RM9 database, I tried the same Custom Report in RM7. It has the same problem.
Added before posting this message: It gets curiouser and curiouser. It initially appeared that some people with multiple spouses had the problem and that some people with multiple spouses did not. For example, the last person in the report is Penny Jane Wiles. She has a marriage date and place listed for both spouses. Except it’s wrong. Her marriage date for her first husband Thomas L. Looney is missing. Her first marriage for her second husband David Warren Rhynehart Jr. is listed next to Thomas L. Looney. And her second marriage to her second husband David Warren Rhynehart is listed next David Warren Rhynehart. So in addition to leaving out spouses sometimes, it is also mixing up spouses and marriages and is listing some marriages with the wrong spouses.
I haven’t tested further, but it seems likely that any Custom report that has columns for family facts like Marriage and Divorce and where the one person has multiple spouses is likely to encounter this problem.
I’m therefore tempted to kill a few trees and to create Individual Summary reports for everybody in the group. I need the information on paper instead of electronically because I will have to give the paper to the clerk in order to get the marriage records I need.
The quick “workaround” is probably to color code the Group and then drag n’ drop any one of the spouses to a temp database and Select from list Mark Find Color code yadda. Then print the Marriage list from the temp.
But it can be sorted by marriage place ( assuming you at least have the county of marriage) and then you should be able to print just those pages or save it as a document and print only those pages…
I haven’t yet tried dragging the group to a temporary database and running the Marriage List report from there, but it’s hard to see why it wouldn’t work perfectly. The Marriage List report is in the exact format I need. The Marriage List report works perfectly for people with multiple spouses. Etc.
There are some subtle points here. For example, I have people in my group who were married more than once and the marriages were in different counties. In that case, I don’t want to see the marriages that are not from my county of interest. But also in that case, the spouse who was married in my county of interest will be in my group and the spouse who was not married my county of interest will not be in my group. So only the correct spouse is in my group and only the correct spouse will be dragged and dropped to the temporary database. So it looks good all the way around.
I just wish the group filter were available on the Marriage List report.
Sorting by marriage place doesn’t filter the report by my group, but the idea of sorting by the marriage place was interesting enough that I tried it anyway. A very nice thing about the Marriage List report is that is one of those reports that can be saved as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. That offers a lot of additional opportunities for sorting and filtering beyond the sorting and filtering provided by RM.
For example, one problem I ran into when I sorted the Marriage List report by place is that it sorts places names frontwards and it really needs to sort place names backwards. So for example, my databases has marriages in such places as Gatlinburg, Sevier County, Tennessee and Henry’s Crossroads, Sevier County, Tennessee and Kodak, Sevier County, Tennessee. And of course, most of the marriage places simply said Sevier County, Tennessee without the name of a town or community because that information is unknown. Because the place name sort in the Marriage List report is front to back, those various place names did not sort all together. So I had to a little extra manipulation in Microsoft Excel to pull those all together, but it was very doable in Microsoft Excel and wouldn’t have been so easily doable without Microsoft Excel.
What wasn’t easily doable in Microsoft Excel was filtering the list by my group. Therefore, my final solution will be to drag and drop my group to a temporary database, to run the Marriage List report from the temporary database, to save the Marriage List report as Microsoft Excel file, and to manipulate and print the report as needed from Microsoft Excel.
Understand your problem and agree that drag and drop would be better BUT for my own info-- could you have used reverse places on the list temporarily to get the Gatlinburg, Sevier County, Tennessee and Henry’s Crossroads, Sevier County, Tennessee and Kodak, etc all together? And just curious–is there any report you can make for a specific group?
As far as I know, there is not a “group report”, per se. But a number of reports can be filtered by group. If all you want is a list of names in a group, then the easiest one to run is probably the Individual List report with all the options turned off.
The reports I can think of that can be filtered by group are as follows. Obviously, some of them might be useful as a “group report” and some of them might not. For example, the Missing Info report will not list people in the group who don’t have Missing Info so it’s not very good for making a “group report”. I think the best reports for making a “group report” are the Individual List and Custom Reports. The trouble with the Individual Summary for making a “group report” is that it has too much information for just a list and each person is on a separate page.
Individual List (lots of options, Parents or not, Spouses or not, Children or not, Facts or not - good “group report” with options turned off)
Individual Summary (each person on a separate page, lots of options)
Custom Reports (can include spouse and marriage, but as already discussed it can be messed up as a marriage report when there are multiple spouses or multiple marriages for the same spouse)
Birthday List
Fact List (if you run it for the Marriage fact, it does not list the spouse)
