RootsMagic

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.

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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.

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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.

[Read more…] about The Secret to Starting Where You Left Off in RootsMagic 3

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.

[Read more…] about Here’s a Quick Way to List Events that Lack Dates in RootsMagic 3