Genealogy Software Tutorials for Mac & PC
Sooner or later most genealogist need to combine two genealogy databases into a new one. In this video: Combining RootsMagic 4 Databases, I show you, step-by-step how it’s done.
Download this video to your computer for your private use by control-clicking and choosing “Download Linked File As” or “Save Link As” (depending on your browser).
The ability to print wall charts from genealogy software is a great feature. Unfortunately, most of us are unable to print on a sheet of paper bigger than 8.5″ by 14″. Having a relatively small printer at home needn’t limit our ability to share these beautiful wall charts with others. By capturing the printer output instead of sending it to an actual printer, we end up with a file that can be emailed or taken to a professional printer. We save to a standard format like PDF so that the print shop can read the file without having to own the same genealogy application we do.
In this video screencast I walk you through downloading a free PDF print driver called PrimoPDF, installing it, configuring the “printer” for a wall chart in RootsMagic 3, and viewing the resulting file. Please follow along and share the fruits of your research by printing big, beautiful, wall charts.
Adoptive relationships can add enough confusion to our genealogy research. We don’t need to be confused by how to represent them in our genealogy database software. In this video I walk you step-by-step through the process of setting up a person as adopted daughter.
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Over time, no matter how careful you have been, you’ll end up with relatives in your genealogy database that are not connected to any other person. This is called an unlinked person in RootsMagic 3. You ought to periodically check for this situation. Fortunately, the software provides a way to identify them and then deal with them.
Genealogy research time is limited and valuable. So much so that many family historians and genealogists skip right to adding and editing data rather than exploring and setting options in their genealogy database software. This can be a mistake because there are time saving treasures buried in there.
For instance, the default start up behavior in RootsMagic 3 is to return you to the pedigree view with the root person selected. I find that having the program start up where I left off last time—with the person and view—is more efficient. In this video I show you how to set the options in RootsMagic 3 to achieve the same efficiency as well as walking through the other selections in the database options dialog.
Few genealogists (okay none really) have a shortage of research goals. Nonetheless, a quick way to find work that needs doing is to find events that lack date or place information. Please open your genealogy data in RootsMagic 3 and follow along with this video. In it I show you how to find those research goals you may be missing.
Having photos in your RootsMagic 3 genealogy database does more than make them available for reports and charts. It also adds flavor and context when looking at the pedigree and family views. As you can see from the image below, seeing photos brings a pedigree view and one’s family history to life.
In this first screencast in a series, I walk you through the different ways of adding and removing photos in RootsMagic 3 as well as giving some background information and pointers. So grab some family history photos and scan them if they aren’t already, launch RootsMagic, navigate to the appropriate person, then play this video and follow along.
The PC genealogy database software, RootsMagic can include preparer information on almost all the reports, charts, and lists it can generate. This information can be set once then included by selecting an option check box. In many cases the inclusion of preparer information is a default, so it will just work after storing the preparer information.
Please open your copy of RootsMagic and follow along with this video as I take you step-by-step through the process of adding the information then show you which reports, charts, and lists support its inclusion.
Family historians often need to import genealogy data. RootsMagic 3 makes this a trivial task, but there are some options of which you may want to take advantage. In this video I take you step-by-step through the process of importing GEDCOM formatted family history data into RootsMagic.
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