After Ancestry.com announced that they were abandoning (aka “retiring”) their venerable Family Tree Maker (FTM) desktop application in Dec 2015, many users and genealogy bloggers asked, “What do I replace FTM with?” Several genealogy desktop app retailers offered discounts and help guides on how to transfer a family tree from FTM to their software. Most of them make it sound as if it’s as simple as exporting your FTM tree to a GEDCOM file and importing the GEDCOM into their application. I say, “Not so fast.” [Read more…] about Family Tree Software Alternatives, Part 1: How to Scrub Your Data (Updated 16 May 2018)
events
Preserving Muster Events in Reunion for Mac
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.
[Read more…] about Preserving Muster Events in Reunion for Mac
Citing a Marriage Event in Reunion for Mac
The marriage event is different from the events for individuals and even “generic” event for the couple in the Macintosh genealogy software, Reunion. Even though it is accessed and stored differently, it’s just as important to cite sources of your event information. Like other sources in Reunion, marriage event sources can include multimedia. This makes it easy to include images of source records when you have them.
Adding a Marriage Event Citation in Reunion for Mac, I show you how to add a citation to a marriage event. I include adding an image of the source record. This part trips some people up because they (quite reasonably) expect it to be connected with the multimedia window, but it isn’t; multimedia for sources is separate.
The Secret to Entering Census Events in Reunion 9 for Mac
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.
Here is a Method That is Helping Reunion 9 Users Deal With Unknown Birth and Death Dates
Do you have unknown birth and death dates in your Reunion 9 family file(s)? If you do, then you understand how those holes can impede your family history research. It’s easier to find information when the date range is constrained. When a death date is not known, it is helpful to use the burial date as the upper date limit. Similarly, the christening date (give or take a year) can be substituted for the birth date. Sure, you could try to remember to check for a burial date when the death date is unknown, but why bother when the software will remember for you?
Reunion for Mac 9 has a feature appropriately called “substitute events.” It will automatically substitute one event for another if the later is not populated. The substitution can be displayed where short dates are used, such as the family card and pedigree chart. Don’t worry. The substituted date is prefixed by an abbreviation, so it won’t be mistaken for the birth or death date.
Please launch Reunion 9 and play this video from the MacGenealogist Archives: Substitute Events in Macintosh Genealogy Software Reunion 9 for Mac. In it, I’ll show you how to make the necessary changes and how the substitute events display.