So, in order to make my family tree meaningful, I feel that it is essential to be able to generate a narrative report that includes Stories about people/events with pictures, Heirlooms that relatives once owned along with any stories and pictures. This is kind of like the capabilities of Personal Historian, but I don’t want it separate from the family tree narrative…so, I don’t see that as an option unless it was somehow integrated into RootsMagic.
Here’s what I tried thus far (based on advice from AI)…
Background: I have a story that my grandmother told me about growing up in her parents house and I have a picture of an associated heirloom (carved wooden plate depicting the house) and a modern day picture of the house.
So, I created a custom “Heirloom” fact.
I created the heirloom fact for my Grandmother’s hand carved plate and attached (media) 2 pictures front/back to that fact. For this particular instance I decided to customize the sentence because I wanted a few more details than the sentence template could provide.
Next, I created a custom “Family Story” fact:
For the description, I put “XXX told by Grandmother” and in the Note, I put the story. I also added a citation that I created:
with my grandmother as the Interviewee, a date of “abt 1982” and me as the Interviewer.
This is the approach that AI recommended although it does seem cumbersome to have 2 different facts rather than a single fact.
In case it isn’t obvious, for some people I expect to have both multiple stories and possibly sometime multiple heirlooms.
The bigger problem for me is how to get a narrative report for everyone in my RootsMagic database and include ALL of the stories/heirlooms for people that have them. I understand that RootsMagic doesn’t have the nice formatting capabilities or Personal Historian, but I would think that I could get all of the stories, heirlooms, and associated pictures to be in a narrative report (and be able to get the stories/heirlooms that are related to print out adjacent to one another). And I would like to be able to control this independently of whether I am printing out the images of citations such as census records, etc.
Thanks for your help… I am completely new to RootsMagic and trying to figure out how to do this before I invest too much time…
A second thing that I would like to create is a “my life in tee-shirts” with a picture of each of the 100+ tee shirts that I own and the associated story… Ideas on how to do this are appreciated as well.