Tuesday, February 28, 2012

No Such Thing as a Useless Post ...

One of the major unspoken rules of blogging seems to be:

There's No Such Thing as a Useless Post - it can always be used, and cited, as a Bad Example.

Such is, apparently, the case with my last post, Making a List of Persons Alive in the 1940 US Census, in which I tried to make a list of persons using RootsMagic 5.  Soon after I whined about how the program wouldn't make the list that I wanted, there was a comment from the RootsMagician, Bruce Buzbee, saying:

"Go to the select screen as before, then:
1) "Mark group", then "Ancestors of highlighted person", then select the ancestors you want
2) Then "Unmark group", then "Select by data fields". On the criteria screen, do:
Birth date > is before > 1840
OR
Birth date > is after > 1940
OR
Death date > is before > 1941"


That is very logical, and matches pretty much what I tried several times.  

Okay ... I tried that, and got an 875 page report.  For some reason, it doesn't work for me!  My database has 41,465 persons in it and for some reason doing EXACTLY what Bruce told me to do doesn't work.  It may be in the selection of "Ancestors and collateral lines" in the "Ancestors of highlighted person" group.

So I started over, doing this:

1)  Mark everyone in my database.
2)  Unmark using the following criteria:

*  Death date >  is before > 1940
*  or Birth date > is after > 1940
*  or Birth date > is before > 1840

I get 162 pages with that selection (about 6,000 persons).   They all seem to meet my criteria.  

The difference here is that, at Bruce's suggestion, I used the "OR" operator instead of the "AND" operator.  

Thank you to Bruce for his patience, and I appreciate that my readers understand that I sometimes write without a safety net here.

Hmm, I could just delete the text of the earlier post and hide the evidence, eh?

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/02/no-such-thing-as-useless-post.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

1 comment:

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