When working with Census I have several family members that were borders. Obviously, that means the “Head of the Household” would not be a family member. I thought this would be a good use of Associates, so I created a Landlord Relationship. Role 1 is Head and Role 2 is Lodger.
I initially added my Census Fact, thinking I could tie the Association to it, but discovered I now have both a Census and “Head” fact. The Head Fact, being the Association, has the details I want to see in Census. Like all my other Census facts, I have the location plus the role of the person; in this case if have Lodger: Henry Louis Meyers.
The other situation I am now faced with is, it appears, I have an “orphaned” person in my tree with no relationship to anyone.
Question: Am I using Associate the wrong way here? How are other people handling census when the head is not related? I really do not want to create a census role just for appearance, plus I think it would be confusing.
I might be wrong but based on my recent observations of associations – I do not thing they should be used for anything like census. That leaves two options – add Just Name or add “disconnect person” to your tree. If you add them and there is a fam search I think that could benefit one later – you never know you might find a connection to family tree you never knew you had – I had this happen twice that I know of because I did it that way.
Maybe someone else had used Associations with Census with success – your approach seems logical, but due to uniqueness maybe not. Maybe Associations are for things like neighbors, people who attended wedding or Doctor who delivered baby and such but not much else ?
For Census facts, it seems to me that either sharing facts or copying facts is the way to go. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of those two ways of doing it. But I don’t see an advantage in trying to use RM’s Associations feature with the Census fact.
I copy census facts rather than sharing census facts. Then I modify the census note slightly for most people after copying the census fact. That gets me date, place, citation, and census image entered once and then copied. The only thing I choose to change slightly for each person is the census note.
The big thing I change in the census note is the relationship of the person to the head of house hold. So that part of the note can be any of the following.
Head of household.
Household of her husband John Doe.
Household of his father John Doe.
Household of her father John Doe.
That’s nowhere near all the possible cases, but that’s the idea.
When the head of household is a family member and a boarder is not, I simply don’t copy the fact to the boarder.
When the head of household is not a family member and a family member is a boarder, I don’t enter a census record for the head of household. Instead, I enter a census fact for the family member where the note will say something like the following:
Boarder in the household of his landlord John Doe.
yes this was my feeling but was wondering if I was missing something.
When the head of household is not a family member and a family member is a boarder, I don’t enter a census record for the head of household. Instead, I enter a census fact for the family member where with note
..
yes this makes sense I have done is this way also but then I thought I missing opportunities to expand tree - nothing wrong with. If you copy it makes more sense if you share it might complicated things in a different way.
Thanks! You just validated my posting this on top what Kevin had posted about associations and census. I never saw that option “Just type name”, which now gives me something else to think about. Kevin mentioned “disconnect person”?
Now, when you say you copy census, are you talking about memorizing and pasting? For a census fact, that is what I do for the Head of House, but then I share that fact with everyone in the family on that census. With each role created for a census, I have a sentence that will create a note (under sentence for that fact): Sam Smith Age: 2 appeared in the 1910 census for [city, county, state] as Son. I think that is essentially what you are saying you “manually” do. Like you, When the head of household is a family member but the is boarder is not, I don’t enter his name. Because of what I am trying to do, the issue I ran into was handling the head of household who is not family. Since my census fact is setup to handle roles from head of household I needed a person not in my tree to show up as head and then share that.
Looking at using “just type a name” I don’t think that would work because I do need that person to show up in my tree. I guess I was hoping Associate would show up differently and be attached to my census fact, not create a new fact. The take-away I have from these threads is using Associate for Census is not the way to go. For discussion’s sake, why would I want to add my neighbor or doctor (as name only) to a fact?
Out of 155 census facts, I only have four associates created for Landlord. Since all of my current census facts are shared (already) and using the sentence I created, any suggestions on how to move forward?
and from Fam Search
The person was a servant (also diff race) so unlikely connect to tree anyway – but I did add them because they were in the household. Not everyone would use that approach which I suppose is fine but for me it goes against my thinking / believe – which is same reason I added all inlaws of spouse by marriage
adding I am not a big fan of using “Just add name” but I am thinking it might be better option due to the structure of RM DB (when used with shared). Essentially the witness role appears in the witness table but it not linked to RM ID . I guess ultimately one need to decide how its ending up (or not) in other software that matters. (TNG etc)
There is no memorize and paste for facts. I wish there were. What I do instead is to use the Copy Fact feature that is still pretty much brand new in RM. Before the Copy Fact feature was available, I had to enter each Census fact from scratch for each family member. I did that for two reasons. One reason was that a lot of other genealogy software didn’t support shared facts if I transferred my data. The other reason was that shared facts were virtually unmanageable in RM. - like you couldn’t search for them or make groups based on them, etc.
Both of these problems with shared facts have been ameliorated through the years. Many other genealogy apps now support shared facts. The main culprits that still don’t support shared facts are Ancestry and FamilySearch. And it’s another pretty much brand new feature in RM that you can now search based on shared facts and make groups based on shared facts. But since I’m still not using shared facts, I’m not sure how well those features work now in RM. It looks like they work pretty well, but I have not played with them.
So what I do is to enter a new Census fact from scratch for the head of household, and then I use the new Copy Fact feature to copy it to the other household members. Another wonderful and pretty much brand new feature in RM is that when you do a Copy Fact you are thrown into the RootsMagic Explorer screen to pick the people to receive the copied fact. The ability to pick people in RootsMagic Explorer has always been there. What’s brand new is that RootsMagic Explorer now supports a little popup screen for the family members where you can check which family members are to receive the copied fact. Prior to that little popup screen, picking the family members was a major, major pain. So this is the greatest new feature in RM in years. It also works if you are sharing the Census fact to select which family members are to receive their Census roles. So the new popup screen for family members in RootsMagic Explorer is not just useful for copying Census facts. It has lots of good uses.
@sbankscharles --Have you ever been searching a line and ran across a name of a person and you are thinking that this name sounds familiar BUT when you search your index you can’t find any info on him?
This would be one reason to add a Census type association BUT I would NOT use Just add a name because it does NOT seem to be an option in associations and just add a name used with shared facts is NOT found anywhere on any search UNLESS you add it to the notes of the primary person-- the only way you can see the just add a name person is to access the original fact where they were used, so to me it’s a waste of time to use that option..
If g- grandma ran a fairly large boarding house / hotel in a city or my g-grandpa was listed as a boarder in a large boarding house/ hotel in a city, I would NOT use an association fact but rather include note --g-grandma had numerous boarders ( but would check the list to see if I recognized anybody) or g-gramps lived with Joe Blow age 45 IL and Wife Sally age 46 IN and family members..
I would use an association if:
any child who was living with another person and there was no designation as to relationship or listed as servant/ farm hand etc— the head of household could be a unrelated guardian or could be a half sibling/ relative I don’t know abt..
g-grandma had 1 or 2 boarders ( even in a big city) especially if she had kids/ siblings who hadn’t married yet…
g-gramps ( and or family) was a boarder / renter even in a city…
Since Associations were designed specifically for and about persons IN the database, those who devote the extra time needed (similar to research notes facility)… certainly could benefit from them in documenting family and in-laws in the same locales as neighbors living next door in the census or matching up family marriages by familial clergy, etc. Their future evolution might enhance reporting or lead to added functionalities. The metric to measure is how applicable associations are to ones genealogy aims.
I think your Joseph Hiram Thompson Jr. post above is an expressive example of NOT adding a disconnected-from-family-tree person, into the database, merely for completeness’ sake. The alternative chosen (for Fred Harston) as a just-added-name person, for purposes of recording the full enumeration, would (as you say) leave a benefit for subsequent research or other researchers to go back to the census and pursue/discover (in this case, Fred Harston turns out to actually be Fred Hairston with a Family Tree of his own). Same to be said for landlords, wards, cousin-in-laws and unmarried school marms, LOL.
As to searching for a name which sounds familiar, but not in my index; no.
In your examples you mentioned g-grandma. As Jerry and I discussed, if a family member ran a boarding house, I would not add any names that were not family. If, for example, the 1930 Census listed her as ‘Head of House’ but everyone living with her was not related, then I would just add the census for her.
My situation is that I have sentences for all my Census Roles. If Steve Jones was a Boarding Housekeeper and g-grandma lived with him, I would need to show him (in my index) as Head of Household. That is what I am working through.
@sbankscharles When you copy a fact, it also copies the media, citations, notes etc-- the only thing that changes is the name of the person-- so if it says
Geo Smith as head of household was recorded Sept 26 1900 at Belleville, Louis Co., KY when you copy it to his son, it will say
Frank Smith as head of household was recorded Sept 26 1900 at Belleville, Louis Co., KY
So your sentence needs to be pretty generic and add / change your notes as Jerry suggested BUT I really like Copy Facts-- there is also a move fact to someone else in case you added it to the wrong person-- in this case, it removes it from the 1st person…
generally my take if it is a reasonable assumption the person does not/ should belong to tree in any meaningful way – I will use “ADD NAME METHOD” while if I simply do you know how (or if ) – but it possible they belong to the tree I will add them to the tree - -not suggesting the method / approach is good for everyone but that is my current thought process
If I’m understanding your question correctly, when you create a new census fact for the head of household and copy the fact to other family members, the citations and media files associated with the census fact are copied along with everything else. So you don’t have to back and add citations and media files to the copied facts.
But I would just emphasize that the same thing is true if you go the shared fact route with roles. Media and citations for the original fact are inherited by the roles. So it can be hard to decide if copying Census facts or using shared facts and roles is the best way to enter census once for the head of household and then “reuse” that census fact for the other family members. RM doesn’t use the term “reuse” for facts, but it’s a way to think about it. RM offers two ways to “reuse” facts - copying them and sharing them.
would you agree that in most cases if Fam Search and Ancestry recognized shared facts/censuses and roles (correctly) there would be almost no reason to use copy facts for censuses?
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