Genealogy Software Tutorials for Mac & PC
A migration map shows the movement of a person over their lifetime. They can help you better understand the person’s life story, uncover clues, and make your research look more interesting.
Displaying a migration map is easy with Family Tree Maker. Unfortunately the genealogy software doesn’t make it easy to add migration maps to a book. That’s the kind of problem I like to solve for you. [Read more...]
I saw this neat tip on ReunionTalk.com this afternoon and I wanted to share with you.
You can add memo fields to a family view to make them easier to review. Memo fields can be displayed for events and facts. If you use memos extensively like I do, this is going to come in handy.
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Storing names in genealogy software seems simple enough at first glance, right? While Family Tree Maker makes it comparatively simple, it’s still a bit tricky when adding name variations, AKAs, suffixes, titles, and multi-word surnames.
Learning how to enter names will speed your evidence capture so you can focus on the fun family history activities: research, analysis, and storytelling. Those fun bits will be easier too! All the information and evidence will be organized.
The index feature in Reunion 9 for Mac software presents a list of person records in your family file. It is useful for navigating your genealogy tree, linking people, marking people for operations like reporting and deletion, and is an initial step for creating an index of individuals report.
All of these functions are enhanced by the ability to modify the columns displayed in the index. In particular, finding an intended individual is easier when sufficient information is present to differentiate similar records.
Reunion enables you to add, remove, and change the order of columns. You can add a column then tell the software what to display in it.
By default the index displays names, birth date, and birth place. These are usually sufficient to distinguish one individual from another. It’s also helpful to see the death date as well.
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Adding a spouse in genealogy software Family Tree Maker is intuitive when it’s a person you haven’t yet added to your tree. What’s not intuitive is how to connect two people who are already in your tree. Take heart though; it’s easy once you know the trick.
The term for linking people in Family Tree Maker is attach. Without knowing that it can be difficult to find the topic in the built-in help index. Looking in the table of contents for “add spouse” will yield instructions for adding a new spouse, but not attaching one. You won’t need the built-in help though because I made a video to show you how it’s done.
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Just in time for memorial day, Ancestry.com has made available new military records. The two new databases, “U.S. World War II Navy Muster Rolls, 1938-1949″ and “U.S. Navy Cruise Books Index, 1918-2009″ offer a glimpse into the lives of our military ancestors. If you have ancestors in these online genealogy databases you will want to enter the records in your genealogy software. If you use Reunion for Mac, I’ll show you how its done in the accompanying video.
The amount of genealogy information available online is increasing. So is the importance of a good, basic citation format for online genealogy databases. As usual, I’ve been implementing GEDCOM safe versions of the citation formats genealogy expert Elizabeth Shown Mills recommends. The source type for databases online is based on one of her basic formats. Following the suggested full reference format for online databases, helps you and other genealogists find the cited database in the future, indicates the quality of your work, and can be used as a basis for more specific source types.
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Adding sources is important and tedious. Genealogy database software Reunion for Mac prevents some of the tedium by allowing you to associate individual sources with multiple events and facts. To do this you’ll want to make sure the data you enter for the source is not specific to an individual. The information that is specific to the individual goes in a different place, called source detail. In this video I show you how to record different source details for census, birth, and marriage events that use the same source. [Read more...]
The historical events you can include in timelines are now manageable in Family Tree Maker 2011. You can add new events and edit and delete any of the events as well.
I noted the absence of a historical event for the 1918 flu pandemic in the set that comes with the product. In this video I show you how to add this event and how to edit and delete other events. You’re welcome to use the 1918 flu pandemic entry I wrote and added to FTM:
Event Title: 1918 Flu Pandemic
Event Date: bet Mar 1918 – Jun 1920
Place: World
Category: World History
Description: This influenza pandemic spread widely across the world between March 1918 to June 1920. It affected primarily young, healthy adults. Unbeknownst at the time, the flu caused an overreaction of the body’s immune system. The healthiest people were at greatest risk of death due to the strength of their own body’s reaction to the virus. It is estimated that 10% to 20% of infected people died as a result of the flu. Current estimates hold that 50 to 100 million people worldwide were killed. [Read more...]
Entering census events into Reunion 9 for Mac can be time consuming and error prone if you don’t use the copy and paste feature.
Census events often apply to multiple people in our genealogy databases. Fortunately, events and their associated source citations can be copied an pasted to other records within Reunion. This method of populating event data can be more efficient and result in fewer mistakes when used for event records that apply to more than one person, like censuses.
In this video, Copying Events in Macintosh Genealogy Software Reunion 9 for Mac, I show you, click-by-click, how to use this time saving and error preventing feature.
GenealogyTools Members, download this video to your computer for your private use.
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