My Trails into the Past

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:  It's Saturday Night again -  Time for some more  Genealogy Fun!! Our mission from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is to: 1)  Sometimes an ancestor or relative just disappears from the records, and we cannot find another record after a certain date.  2)  Tell us about one or more of your relatives or ancestors who have disappeared and have not been found since a certain date.  Do you have any idea of what might have happened to them? Here's mine: First, I can share a blog post I wrote for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks two weeks ago about an ancestor who disappeared: WhatBecame of Robert Hutson of Cherokee County, Georgia? I wondered how I could locate all the people in my database who have no death fact. I have RootsMagic 10 now and used the search feature, focusing on an event that has a blank death date. I got 4839 matches out of 7462 people. That is not a great statistic! Many of the hits are pe...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:  It's  Saturday Night  again -  Time for some more  Genealogy Fun!! Our mission from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is to: 1)  If you have your family tree research in a Genealogy Management Program (GMP), whether a computer software program or an online family tree, figure out how to find how many persons, places, sources, etc. are in your database (hint:  the Help button is your friend!) 2)  Tell us which GMP you use, and how many persons, places, sources, etc. are in your database(s) today in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook comment. NOTE:  WE last did this in November 2021. Here's mine: Like Randy, I use RootsMagic 10. I saw that I had an update to make, so I took care of it before checking the statistics. Tools > Enhanced Properties List I hope this can be read. I could not figure out how to make...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's  Saturday Night  again - Time for some more  Genealogy Fun!! Here is our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings : 1)  Have you created a Problem report from your desktop genealogy software program?  Tell us which software you're using, how you found the "Problem Report," and your results using it. Here’s mine: I’m in Salt Lake City on a short research and writing trip, and am getting to this Sunday morning. It’s been very pleasant here in the 70s. I am a member of the RootsMagic SIG at the California Genealogical Society and we had a discussion about the Problem Search tool a few months ago. I ran this tool and fixed a few items. I was curious about what new items I might find now a few months later. Here are the items I am having the tool check: Here are the results. I remember now that for some of the items, I did not have enough information to make a correction, for example with a woman who was 52 ye...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's  Saturday Night  again - Time for some more  Genealogy Fun!! Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing's assignment for us tonight: Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!): 1.  Does your genealogy management software (e.g, Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic, Legacy Family Tree, Reunion, Heredis, Family Historian, etc.) create a "Fact List" report (or something similar) - a list of the profiles in your family tree that have (or don't have) a specific Fact (e.g., birth, death, burial, immigration, etc.)? 2.  If so, run a Fact List to determine which people have a specific Fact (or don't have a specific Fact) and share it with us.  3.  Share your results with us in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.  Leave a comment on this post with a link to your results. Here’s mine: I, too, use RootsMagic and found all the people wh...

Randy Seaver’s mission this week is to: 1)  Is your genealogy software family tree database perfect?  With no errors or inconsistencies?  Yep, mine isn't either!  Big time.  With over 49,000 persons there are bound to be some errors in my tree.  Even 1% would be 490 persons or 1,500 events! 2)  This week, find your genealogy software's "Problem Report" or something similar.  Tell us how you found it, and what it tells you about the problems in your family tree database. 3)  Share your results with us in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post. I also have RootsMagic as my genealogy program and followed the same directions that Randy gave. I used the following criteria to find the errors: Criteria I used for the error report And my report came back with 21 errors. I have 7091 people in my database with 16,627 events. Twenty-one errors about of sixteen thousand or so events comes out to...