I received a question offline about how I achieve my People List View grid. I thought I would answer the question for everybody. Here is an example of the grid I use all the time.
The columns such as 1870, 1880, etc. or for census facts for those census years. The way I achieve that effect for People List View is to have separate census fact types for each possible census year, such as 1870 Census for the 1870 census year, 1880 Census for the 1880 census year, etc. Then I enter just the year as the date for the census, e.g. just 1870 for the 1870 census year rather than 12 Apr 1870 if the census for the family was enumerated on that date. I include the actual enumeration date in the note for the 1870 census fact, or whichever fact it is.
Having entered the census data in that fashion, the columns for People List View are simply things like 1870 Census date, 1880 Census date, etc. For such columns, I adjust the column width to be as narrow as possible and still show the census year.
This whole process has the salutary effect of making missing data stand out like a sore thumb. But my initial impetus for having separate census facts for each possible census year is that otherwise Advanced Searches for census data are virtually impossible. That’s still true, even with the recent improvements to Advanced Search in RM10. My favorite example is searching for people who were enumerated in the 1850 census in Texas. You can’t do it using the standard Census fact. That’s because someone who was enumerated in 1850 in Tennessee and in 1860 in Texas will get a hit when you search for a census date of 1850 and a census place of Texas.
I have major heartburn with my columns because if I add a new column or if a delete an existing column, all the column widths for all the existing columns are lost and and I have to reset the width of each column. I think that’s very poor design. It should remember the width of each existing column when I add a new column or delete an existing column.
I also have additional columns. But on a standard size monitor, I have to scroll left and right to see all the columns. But that’s ok. Here is example of scrolling the same people to the right.
You were doing exactly what I suspected. This makes perfect sense due to the lack of capability even with advance searching. The only real hurdle (for me and most others) would be the initial transition from “census fact” to decade Census fact (for US).
As for column widths there are some other places I have had to “fight” to get what I want or for it to “stick”
Question part 2 – did you convert those using Sqlite?
and if so, can you share?
I would prefer to work in RM - although I have something similar for PBI that I can do.
Once other thing that could be more easily done in RM is some color coding that would not work in many cases.
ques 3 will shared roles display in the cols? (I believe you do not use shared for Census)
I did it totally manually. But Tom subsequently created an SQLite script to automate the process. If I remember correctly, Tom’s script had a couple of neat features. One of them was that he provided a way to reverse the script. The other is that he provided a way to export the Census by Year facts in GEDCOM as if they were the standard Census fact.
The reason I was able to do it totally manually is that at the time I did it, I really didn’t have very many Census facts because during my early years of genealogy I wasn’t entering census data as facts.
Shared roles are not supported as columns in People List View. That’s one of several reasons that I make only very limited use of shared roles. Another reason is that shared roles are not supported by any of RM’s search mechanisms.
The biggie for many users with respect to shared roles is census. But I decided to do census the hard way and enter it all manually for each person. The new Copy Fact feature helps a lot in this regard, but I think it’s still much too hard to pick the family members who need to receive the copied census fact.
The genealogy programs I started using back 30yrs ago did not have a “Shared” option as I recall, only Ultimate Family Tree did. Each person has their own census with notes. When RM introduced the “Shared” I didn’t want to go back and redo my database.
If I was starting out, I probably would use “Shared”
I was able to create a Census fact to show in the column in the list view but can’t get it to display the date, ie, 1900, etc. I tried the date filed, the note, and the sentence template but it won’t show in the column like yours. I’m using RM9.
I am showing the census date. When I enter the census date, only enter the year part of the date such as 1870. If I know the rest of the date such as 12 Apr 1870, I include that in the note for the census fact.
However, the problem you are having may be that RM’s People List View will only show one fact of each type. So if you have an 1850 census for a person and an 1860 census for the same person and an 1870 census for the same person, then People List View will only show one of those three census facts and the other two will not be shown.
I get around this problem by having a custom fact type for each census year. For example, I have a custom fact type called 1850 Census, a custom fact type called 1860 Census, and a custom fact type called 1870 Census, etc. Then under normal circumstances, a person will only have one 1850 Census fact, only one 1860 Census fact, and one 1870 Census fact. I can make a separate column for each of the facts in People List View because they are not the same fact type. That’s what you are seeing in my People List View.
As you might expect, I do have the occasional rare situation where the same person was enumerated two different times in the same census year. It usually happens because the family moved just after they were enumerated the first time and then they were enumerated again in their new home after they moved. But I just live with that situation when it comes to People List View.
Thanks, Jerry. I set up a column for the fact "1900 Census. " The column shows up but I can’t get 1900 to show up in the column next to the person’s name. What am I doing wrong?
“1900 Census” gives you the Description field for the 1870 Census fact (not the most intuitive way for the RM user interface to work - I think it should say “1900 Census Description” in the user interface)… You need “1900 Census Date”.
