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Managing Historical Events in Family Tree Maker 2011

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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…] about Managing Historical Events in Family Tree Maker 2011

Cleaning Up Living Flags in RootsMagic 4

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You may be shocked to discover that you have the living dead in your RootsMagic database. [I’m just now realizing this should be a halloween post] By this I mean, records for people who have passed, but are marked “living” (the living flag is checked). Cleaning this condition up is made easier by RootsMagic making it simple to select people who are marked “living” and have birth dates prior to 120 years before today.

Cleaning this up is one of those annual maintenance tasks you can do to keep your data clean. I’ll show you, click-by-click, how to do it in this video.
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Adding To-Do Items in RootsMagic 4

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The genealogy task list is an important planning tool in the genealogist’s kit. Unfortunately, it’s also often overlooked. A recent article, Keeping a Genealogy Task List, on MacGenealogist.com describes the value of this tool and its two critical functions.

RootsMagic includes the ability to manage genealogy tasks and satisfies both of the critical purposes of a genealogy task list: unobtrusive storage and simple, powerful recall. The functions are unobtrusive because they’re built-in to the software.

Task Storage

There is something to be said about keeping your task list in a different application; you’re able to switch quickly away to capture those thoughts that seem to bubble up without regard to what we’re in the middle of, then return to the task at hand without losing your place.

Using the built-in task list means you’ve got to finish what you were doing in the software before capturing your thought. That’s dangerous because that kind of delay often causes us to write the task on a scrap of paper or envelope back. We all know that those things get misplaced—not what we want to happen to our research plans! The offsetting positive of keeping the tasks in your genealogy software is that it’s all in your genealogy software.

Task Recall

Recalling tasks in RootsMagic is powerful, but could be simpler as you’ll see in an upcoming article and video. Meanwhile, in this video: Adding To-Do Items in RootsMagic 4, I show you how to add each of the three types of to-do items in RootsMagic:

  1. Person
  2. Family
  3. General

A person to-do is a task that’s associated with a specific person. Likewise, a family to-do is one that is associated with a specific family. A general to-do is one that is not associated with a person or a family. Each type is added in a different way. Watch this video to make it all clear and put this important genealogy planning tool to use.