emkaysmith

Ha! Thanks very much, zhangrau. I obviously missed seeing that tucked up there in the corner. This, and sorting the kids, was one of those things TMG just did automatically, so I never had to think about it.

Rename your source if adding completely new information   

 

I figured out how to have one master source for each census year

and have all censuses for 1850 example on one list.  

 

go to 

http://forums.rootsm...er-census-year/    

Hope this helps.

 

Yes, I know people who do that, but I don't. I try to maintain adherence to the NGSQ citation standard (which is Elizabeth Mills''s method, really) because most of what I do eventually gets published, either online or in journal articles. Doing source citations the proper way now saves me time in having to correct everything in piecemeal fashion later. I presently have ~3,000 census sources, though not all in one database, (Plus ~1,500 other, non-census sources.) Since the census sources all follow exactly the same pattern, it only takes a minute to copy and edit one in order to create a new one

Thank you to both Jims! Yes, I've spent most of this morning exploring the ins and outs of groups in greater depth, and I'm figuring out ways of identifying subgroups of people in a dataset so I don't have to add them to the group only one at a time. I'm an experienced end-user but not a techie (librarian/historian/genealogist), so building queries and such is slow going for me -- but I'm getting there.

Mike

 

That's what I would do. Clear all your colors. Make your group into a color. Drag and drop the color.

 

I have talked about this several times before, but I have changed my usage of color coding a great deal through the years. I used to treat color coding as pretty permanent - color coding one group of ancestors one color, color coding a different group of ancestors a different color, etc. I think that lots of RM users do the same thing. But through the years I have changed my approach considerably. Color coding is so useful that I need to be willing to destroy it and do it all over again on a moments notice. And then do the same thing again a few minutes or a few days later. So now I do more permanent flagging of  people by doing things like adding custom facts to them as flags.

 

Custom facts work great for creating color coding, for creating groups, for looking at things in People View, etc. The problem with custom facts is that you have to add them one at a time unless you do a bulk add with SQLite. This is a huge advantage that TMG had in that it had "permanent" flags that could be set with a bulk operation. RM has no such facility. Neither color coding nor groups nor bulk adding shared facts nor bulk adding sources with MultiCite does what's really needed.

 

I don't think that RM7 does bulk operations very well. It's not just this example, but many other examples. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, RM8 includes better to support various needful kinds of bulk operations.

 

Jerry

Okay, thanks. I'm going to give the color thing a shot. I haven't used color codes in RM yet -- still a new user, as I said -- but I made heavy use of customized flags in TMG. My field is "local history" and I have several whole-population projects I've been working on for years. I've used flags to identify the members of certain pioneer church congregations that uprooted themselves and moved to a new state en masse, and to track those who served in a particular Civil War unit together, and so on. I hadn't found anything about "flags" in RM, but it looks like color-coding serves the same function.

Mike

While you cannot drag'n'drop a named group (which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do), you can export it to GEDCOM and then import it into a new database. The irony is that drag'n'drop is a background export/import via GEDCOM.

Read this to understand what you might lose in the process: https://sqlitetoolsf...ransfer-losses/

Rats. Exporting a GEDCOM and then importing it into a new file is exactly what I was trying to avoid. GEDCOM is a lossy process, as I well know. One of the deciding factors for my picking RM as a replacement for TMG is that it can do a full direct import of the TMG dataset. I have a number of large TMG datasets that have nothing to do with my own family -- whole-population studies of certain historical communities, and so on. Far too large to do any significant retyping of info that GEDCOM couldn't handle.

Doing a direct copy of everything in a subset of a file for the creation of a new file needs to be on the developers' wish list.

Mike