With RM7 I created a census fact for the Head of household and then shared it allocating the roles relating to the “relationship to head”. That way if I needed to add notes I only needed to do it once. Now that you can copy a complete fact I am wondering what the advantage of copying the fact instead of sharing it would be. I also share other types of facts to indicate witnesses in marriages; executors in wills and I don’t think these would be relevant to copy.
I do find the sharing functionality with RM10 harder to use as you don’t have the ability to select and “go to” family members.
Advantage of copying facts rather than sharing facts:
Not all genealogy software in the world supports shared facts. If you transfer your data to software that does not support shared facts, your shared facts are lost. Copied facts do not have this problem.
RM’s shared facts cannot be searched or used as criteria for making groups or for color coding. RM’s shared facts cannot be used as columns in People List View nor as columns in Custom Reports. As a result, RM’s shared facts can be very hard to manage. Copied facts do not have this problem.
I totally agree, except that it’s not just the sharing functionality that is harder with RM10. Any functionality involving the selection of family members is harder with RM10. Well, you can select a whole family with RM10 as you could with RM7. But selecting some family members and not others was much easier in RM7.
This problem is not specific to sharing facts. The missing functionality is missing from the RM Explorer screen. For example, if you copy facts instead of sharing facts in RM10, there is the same problem that selecting some but not all family members is difficult. But sharing facts and copying facts are not the only functions that utilize the RM Explorer screen.
Thank you! I don’t intend to transfer to other s/w so that isn’t an issue for me.
I haven’t experimented much with custom reports, colour coding or groups but I do worry about how the duplication will look.
When I print a family group sheet with my shared facts I can immediately see the relationship to the head of household e.g. for William Thomas Scutt the entry includes
“Census - son 3 Apr 1881 William SCUTT-1207; Ramon Road (Old Forge) Pulborough Sussex England”
In contrast if I just copy a census fact there is no role information or link to the head of household so it just contains:
“Census 3 Apr 1881 Ramon Road (Old Forge) Pulborough Sussex England”
There are instances where the link to the head of household isn’t as obvious as this and having the record number and name helps clarify relationships between households at different times.
I can see that not being able to search for shared facts will be a nuisance I do remember wanting to see who appeared in the 1921 census for example and in my database it would only pick up the head’s of household.
Do you know why shared facts aren’t searchable?
Yes. If you ever want to reap the full benefit from shared facts, the feature needs further development. RM Inc has a history of adding features to its What’s New in Version X for users to discover that they are fundamentally limited in what they can do. Shared facts not only should be searchable, they should also be convertible into individual facts, both on-the-fly for Export, TreeShare, FamilySearch and permanently within a database. They should be as fully supported by every other feature in RM as individual facts are.
The Copy Facts feature is a cop-out from developing Shared Facts to the level it should have been!
I know shared facts don’t show up in the Timeline List report. In fact, they aren’t even listed in a person’s Details panel when the person is selected in the family view.