6 replies to this topic

[knotmyline]

I just purchased Roots Magic and loaded my Family Tree Maker database into RM. My database is over 56,000 individuals and loading it into RM was quick and easy, thanks. 

 

The 1st thing I noticed is a discrepancy between the record counts of the 2 systems. The count of individuals match in both systems, but I have about 800 more Families in RM than I have Marriages in FTM.

 

I suspect this suggests I have an issue somewhere in my data.  

 

Is there a way of researching and understand why this has occurred and helping me correct whatever is causing this difference? 

[TomH]

In RM, any couple is a "family ", regardless of a Marriage event.

[knotmyline]

Thanks, Tom. I am accustomed to FTM where in their database marriage & family appear to be the same, a separate record that reflects the relationship between two individuals. That "marriage" record will exist in FTM even without an actual marriage. In FTM ghost records can easily be left in their DB if the user does not properly delete data for the two individuals in a relationship. I have yet to see the RM schema so I just assumed that a similar record existed in RM. Also, I assume that both systems were counting the physical records and not data contained in them. Your response provides me with a possible clue to why there is a difference, but I still do not understand how I can research and resolve the difference.  Any hints?      

[TomH]

You can learn about the RootsMagic database through the wiki linked in my signature. Each record in the FamilyTable contains a couple, although one of the pair may be unknown, e.g., where only the father of a person is known. Whenever you add a link between a child and a parent, it is between the child and a couple. Couples can be defined without their having a standard, family type Marriage fact. You cannot assign the standard, family type Marriage event to anything other than a couple.

To find people who are coupled (in a family) but lacking a Marriage fact, I would create a named group comprising those people who have a spouse (number of spouses > 0) AND for whom the Marriage fact does not exist. That won't directly answer your question but should give you some insight.

Otherwise, I would turn to SQLite to run queries on the RM database to get counts of this or that but without something similar in FTM, I don't know of a way to reconcile the differences other than through laborious family by family cross checking, person by person...

[mikelevoi]

In my experience, the counts shown in FTM for "marriages" are meaningless ;-) I have tried and tried to make sense of what they are counting and I cannot reconcile their counts with the actual data ;-) Indeed, I had to write my own program to read the GEDCOM output from FTM to see what was really going on.

 

Example - my primary FTM DB. FTM says that I have 1402 people and 400 "marriages". In actual fact, the following is true - based on the GEDCOM output:

 

Number of Individuals: 1402
Number of Families: 420
Number of Invalid Families: 7

Invalid Family: @F47@
Invalid Family: @F48@
Invalid Family: @F49@
Invalid Family: @F51@
Invalid Family: @F308@
Invalid Family: @F309@
Invalid Family: @F333@

Invalid Family (Husband or Wife and no children): @F47@ - -
Invalid Family (Husband or Wife and no children): @F48@ - -
Invalid Family (Husband or Wife and no children): @F49@ - -
Invalid Family (Husband or Wife and no children): @F51@ - -
Invalid Family (Husband or Wife and no children): @F308@ - -
Invalid Family (Husband or Wife and no children): @F309@ - -
Invalid Family (Husband or Wife and no children): @F333@ - -

 

Valid Families with Marriage and Source: 353
Valid Families with No Marriage: 55
Valid Families with a Marriage and no Source: 5
Invalid Families with Marriage: 5
Invalid Families with No Marriage: 2

 

An invalid family is a family with no "husband" AND no "wife" ;-) It is a phantom left in the FTM DB when records are deleted in the wrong order. Of my 7 invalid families, 5 of them have a marriage event ;-)

 

However, even taking this information into account - I cannot total any of the values above and get the answer "400" ;-)

 

You can probably assume that RM counts are correct. PS I reported all these issues to FTM over a year ago - no fix has ever been provided - nor any explanation about what their "marriage" count means ...

[Renee Zamora]

See if compacting your FTM database makes a difference when imported into RootsMagic. You can also run File>Database Tools, all options in consecutive order. 

[knotmyline]

TomH, MikeLevoi, & Renee Zamora, thanks for your comments. Each of you has helped.