I’m curious as to how folks use RM for analysis and maintenance of trees vs offline analysis.
I struggled for years to find a genealogy tool that worked for me, so my “database” has been Microsoft Word. I have collected thousands of events in chronological order annotated with endnotes, and developed automation to take some of the toil out of maintaining it. I’ve been able to connect and cross-reference individuals across events to some degree, but it’s time-consuming. My events are rigorously structured, which has recently allowed me to automate exporting the data to Excel for richer analysis.
Finding RM, with its event-based model, has been a godsend, and I’m actively loading information into it. However, I’m torn between simply loading every raw fact into RM, then using it to turn those into families, etc. vs doing that offline in my Excel sheet and just loading the clean information to RM.
I’d appreciate hearing how folks are using RM to actively investigate relationships between individuals, connect individuals into families, etc. If there are RM articles or blogs on this, I’ve missed them so feel free to point me that direction.
I think that this might be a difficult question to answer on how to going about what you want as what works for person A may not work for person B.
I will say – since its a family tree the objective / focus should be about family groups including related ancestors and descendants. You can enter basic facts on those people and then later expand to other facts. (Birth Marriage Death first) then expand to Burial Census Draft and so on. I think census is important because it usually shows and comfirms family at that time. I always try to find at least one census of spouses before marriage.
Having info outside of WORD gives you lots of options to look at larger picture and document sources etc. If I was to use a NON Family tree program – I would probably use One Note.
I am sure others will give better detailed response but those are couple thoughts.
Kevin
“Clean” wasn’t the best choice of words. Maybe “raw” vs “assimilated” . “Raw” information is an event where I do not yet know how the individual(s) fit into my tree. “Assimilated” is when I do. I’ve focused on entering assimilated (“clean”) information into RM first.
I’m looking for any opinions or advice on how best to assimilate raw information. I’m inclined to enter raw events into RM and use tools such as the Association View to assimilate them. I’ll probably wind up creating then merging a bunch of duplicate individuals with this approach, but maybe that’s OK. Does anyone have any tips, tricks, or RM features that would help? Assimilating in RM must be easier or more efficient than continuing to do it offline in Word/Excel.
Of course, to @kevync1985’s point, there may not be one approach that works for every person.
Suggestion – map out your Priorities / goals and review which suggestion seem best to lead you to them. Nothing wrong with adpating thing as you going – but I would keep some sort of cheat sheet / plan written to stay organized ( as possible)
I usually keep weekly , monthly and quarterly I want to do – plus longer term
For a person, or family, whose possible relationship to your tree is unknown, you could simply “Add a new unlinked person”. So from any view in the People tab > + sign > Add individual. These unlinked families are separate trees in your database. Once entered, access them from the People tab > tools (wrench & screwdriver icon) > Count trees. If desired you can add tasks to them to record your thoughts. When you discover how they fit in, you can link them in and they become part of your main tree and they are no longer a separate isolated tree.
If you don’t want to add these people in yet, but rather just enter your “raw facts” (say a census), you can just add that census, creating both a source and a citation. One of the nice things about RM10 is you can create the source/citation without having to create a person first. You can also create tasks for the source and/or citation to record your thoughts.
Jeff,
I’ve started doing #1 already as I’m typically creating a new tree with what I’ve assimilated offline. This is working reasonably well, but as you say, I’ve had to add numerous tasks and notes to remind me to go back for further work. I’m not clear how the Count Trees feature helps me. There’s so little info in that dialog box it seems like you already need to know which tree to go to, and in that case, I just go to the individual directly. What am I missing?
For #2, I don’t understand how just creating a source/citation without individuals will help me map individuals.
Mark-- I guess you could say for the most part, that I’ve always used the clean/ assimilated way of doing things BUT this is because I am usually researching one family at a time-- I might end up with info on 3 or 4 generations of this one line or the parents and all the siblings BUT make separate documents for each and then add it one family at a time …
BUT that works for me as I’ve already built my database where as you have 1000s of facts ( probably either divided up by where it happened such as Christening/ Weddings/Death at St Mary’s Church or by events such as obits/ wills etc) and are now just building your database–in my personal opinion, it’s going to be faster for you to just enter all the raw data --linking those you can now and then again after you are done and can confirm that Mary’s parents Wm and Sarah were also John’s parents…
I think one thing you can do that MIGHT help is make sure you include the location in the fact such as St Mary’s Church for Christening, marriages etc ( and make sure you add a religion fact to the parents)–obits could have a lived in location etc-- that way when you come across a fact later on that says Joe Blow had a son Baptized at St Mary’s, you can quickly check Place Details for St Mary’s to see if you already have a Joe Blow there in the same time frame…
I think what Jeff is referring to on the count trees is that you can run the report–select a person then go directly to their tree from that report rather than scrolling thru a whole list of people with the same last name and maybe a lot of them having the same first name
Genealogy has long held the principle of going from what you know individual by individual starting with what you know and advancing one generation at a time. Genealogy programs help us do this. Most of us start with ourselves when we attempt to create the history of our own families.
If I were Mark, I would begin using a genealogy program such as RM with the basic pedigree chart approach and fill in the names and dates for the first few generations with few details initially. Assuming he wants to have a file to possibly share online in gedcom format, I would initially ignore getting into the weeds with details. He already has those in his prior approach so could fill those in later as he determines how he wants to use a genealogy program to store data.
Most of us find as we research we find possible links to our family but do not know the connection. So within a database we can start a number unlinked trees, but, again keep to the principle of going one generation at a time to make sure we are not jumping to conclusions as to how people might connect. Eventually we may be able to link these unlinked trees to our earlier known line.
Thanks to everyone for the suggestions; very helpful. I’ve followed the principle of going one generation at a time; I’m currently working to confirm who my 10g-grandfather is, as well as which ancestor came to the US from the UK and when.
The only way I’ve been able to do any of this is to also “go broad”, i.e. looking for wills of fathers-in-law, court proceedings of related families, land grants, etc. I’ve been able to connect a lot of these events “offline” and am working to get all that information into RM. But, I’m sure there are hidden insights in the unlinked people I have events for. I’m really hoping RM features like Association View will help.
@nkess I do included city/parish/county where I can, although I have not thought to include the actual church. Sounds like a good idea. @JeffH On the Count Trees point, I currently have 12 William Whitby trees, 8 Richard Whitby’s, 11 John Whitby’s, 19 Thomas Whitby’s, etc. If the Count Trees feature can help navigate this, I don’t see how.
I pile all my online research into OneNote notebook with a page per citation, including web url and name of media file(s) then load to RM in slower time and move the pages from the Additions section group to the Done section group. That way I can store possibles and tentative data without mesing up my RM.
For reporting and finding gaps I write SQL queries and use Excel with OBDC connection to the RM database so I can just refresh the spreadsheet data.
So this morning I was looking at a spreadsheet listing citations without web tags (URL) and correcting those.
SQLite 3 ODBC connector.
When connecting, I put the following in the advanced options
DSN=SQLite3 Datasource;Database={full database file path and name} StepAPI=0;SyncPragma=NORMAL;NoTXN=0;Timeout=100000;ShortNames=0;LongNames=0;NoCreat=0;NoWCHAR=0;FKSupport=0;JournalMode=;OEMCP=0;LoadExt=;BigInt=0;JDConv=0;