Another weekend has rolled around and it’s time for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver on Genea-Musings.
This week’s challenge is tech-related:
- 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!)
Although I have several genealogy software programs, like Randy I use RootsMagic. However, I haven’t had time to play with RM8, so my Properties view is slightly different:
I have:
People – 9116
Families – 3769
Events – 17070
Places – 1640
Sources – 70
Citations – 319
Multimedia Items – 5017
Multimedia Links – 7082
I made a lame attempt a couple of years ago to use the source templates and I’m actually surprised that there are 70 sources and 319 citations in this list. I would have guessed under 25.
I still prefer to list my sources in the Notes section for each person.
The Alternate Names option frankly makes me crazy and I purposely went through the tree and deleted them all. My person list looks much cleaner and, again, I prefer to put alternate names in my notes and recording a slight misspelling of someone’s name isn’t particularly important to me. Names that are mangled I do note.
One of my goals for 2022 will be to jump into RootMagic 8. I just haven’t had the time, as compiling the links to county histories for all 50 states took close to three months (at 8 hours or more per day 7 days a week) and I am almost done with my one-place study of St. Dimitry’s Church parish (Udol & Hajtovka, Slovakia), which has taken almost 3 months.
With those projects off my plate, I might just make a real effort with the source citation templates. Part of my reluctance was wondering if I would have to go back and fix anything in RM8.
Thanks, Randy, for this week’s challenge. It has me thinking ahead to my 2022 genealogy goals.
I guess whatever the “Alternate Names” field is must be something I don’t have in Family Tree Maker. But you have been doing lots of linking to documents, it seems. That is something I’ve totally avoided.
I have lots of sources/citations in my notes area, too, left over from PAF days. I sometimes work on them when working on a family again after many years. I see I have used alternate names a whole bunch. I think I will do the same as you and move them to the notes area. I have many Swedish and German ancestors who changed the spelling of the surname or the surname altogether.