Jerry Bryan

There are actually several ways that are already supported in RM to do this in descendant narrative reports. Some further improvements might be useful, but likely RM can already do what you wish. For example:

• Under Options when you are making a report, there is an option called Keep fact sentences in same paragraph. You can change this to start each fact in a new paragraph or to start a new paragraph for facts with notes.
• You can put carriage returns within notes, and you can put carriage returns at the end of notes to start the next fact on a new paragraph.
• You can put carriage returns at the beginning of the sentence templates for your fact sentences. This is the way I presently do it. You have to do it once for the death fact and it applies to all the death facts in your database. You have to do it once for the burial fact and it applies to all the burial facts in your database. The birth fact generally speaking goes to a new paragraph anyway because it is the first fact for a person.

The flip side is that there are places in RM's descendant narrative reports that have excessive white space, sometimes grossly excessive. You can save your descendant narrative reports to an RTF file and edit the RTF file with a word processor before printing a report. With Microsoft Word at least, you can use a global replace to remove all such excessive white space all at one go rather than removing it one little bit at a time. If you do anything like that and if you have a Name Index or a Place Index in your report, you have to tell Microsoft word to rebuild those indexes after removing the excessive white space and before printing the report.

Jerry

Setting up groups for your grandparents should be a very quick process.

When you are making groups, there are a huge number of useful options on how to select people to go in the group. Most of the options allow you to select multiple people at the same time, perhaps dozens or hundreds or even thousands of people all at the same time. If you go into the Groups dialog, to make a new group you first click on the New button and it will take you into RM's marking dialog. From here, navigate to your grandparent of choice, click the Mark group button, and select the Ancestors of highlighted person option. You can then choose the Direct ancestors only option or the Ancestors and descendants of ancestors option. You can specify the number of generations of ancestors. If you choose the Ancestors and descendants of ancestors option you can also choose the number of descendants for each one.

You really do have to navigate to your grandparent of choice AFTER entering the Mark group dialog, even if you were already on that grandparent when you start the process. Being able to start on the person you are already on would be a very useful improvement to RM. You will need to create four groups, one for each grandparent. So upon completing the process of making a group for one grandparent, you will need to begin the process anew to create the group for each of the other three grandparents.

Groups do not update automatically if you add new people to your database who should be in the group. So you will periodically need to refresh your groups by running doing an Edit instead of a New on the groups to specify your marking criteria again. RM's users have much wished for a more automated way to refresh groups after adding people to your database.

Jerry

There is no new news about an RM8 release date other than "this year". The brief RM8 demos that people have seen at genealogy conferences suggest a much flatter, much more modern user interface. There are very few details from the demos.

Jerry

The best mechanical process is to create new and empty databases for each of your wife and for your grandparents, and then to use drag and drop to copy people from the existing combined database to the new databases as appropriate.

Drag and drop does not MOVE people. It COPIES people, so it does not remove anybody from your existing database.

Drag and drop initially has the look and feel as if you are dragging and dropping just one person, like it would take forever to accomplish your task because you might have to drag and drop one person at a time. But when you do the drag and drop, it will ask you if you wish to move just the one person or if you wish to move more than one person. The menu that pops up has lots and lots of options, like move all the ancestors of the person etc. It may take a while playing with it to figure out all the options just the way you want them but each drag and drop can copy many thousands of people all at the same time.

Having said all that, the best way to split your database is probably not to split it. Most experienced RM users recommend a single database. There are numerous advantages to a single database.

Jerry

I think what you are doing makes perfect sense.

Jerry