Monday, June 27, 2016

Creating a List of Burials in a Specific Cemetery Using RootsMagic

I moderated the RootsMagic User Group (RMUG) of the San Diego Genealogical Society (SDGS) last Saturday (we meet the 4th Saturday of each month at the San Diego FamilySearch Library in Mission Valley (4195 Camino del Rio South) at 10:30 a.m.) and, once again, learned something about the capabilities of RootsMagic.

Have you ever wanted to create a list of persons in your RootsMagic database who are buried in a specific cemetery?  Or a list of persons who were born in a specific town?  Or a list of persons who were enumerated in a specific census?  The list of possibilities is endless, I think.

I wanted to determine which persons in my RootsMagic database are buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Leominster, Massachusetts.  I have used the burial place as "Leominster, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States" in my database, and the burial place details as "Evergreen Cemetery."

My colleagues at the RMUG suggested that we look at the RootsMagic blog post titled Tip: Planning a Cemetery Visit by Michael Booth, posted 22 May 2014.  The RootsMagic Help article for "Individual Lists" is also helpful.

Here is the process I used:

1)  In the Reports menu, click on "Print a Report" and scroll down to "Individual List:"


2)  I clicked on the "Individual List" item and the "Report Settings" screen came up.  On the dropdown menu for "People to include." I selected "Select from list:"


3)  After clicking on "Select from list," the "Select People" screen opened, and I clicked on the "Mark group" button:


4)  I clicked on the "Select people by data fields" item and that opened the "Search for information" screen:


On the screen above, there are six rows of criteria to create the list of persons.  In the first row, The second column is for the Fact type - for my list I chose "Burial" from the dropdown list.  The third column is for the record field - I chose "place" from the dropdown list.  The fourth column is for the type of match - I chose "Contains" from the dropdown list.  In the 5th column, I typed in the word "leominster."  The first row then reads:

"Burial place contains leominster."

I did the same type of operation for the second row so it read:

"Burial place detail contains evergreen."

I had to do the first row so as to eliminate any other town with an Evergreen Cemetery, and I had to do the second row so as to eliminate any other Leominster cemetery.

5)  When I was done, I clicked "OK" on the screen above, and the program counted up the number of persons that matched my search criteria.  There were 84:


6)  Now I want to print the list out.  I clicked "OK" twice, and was back to the "Individual List" screen.  I clicked on the "Facts (events) for each person" and the "Print place details" boxes:


7)  I'm ready to create the List, so I clicked the "Generate Report" button on the screen above.  The list appeared:


There are 27 pages of persons for this list.  I could save it to my computer as an RTF or PDF file, or I could print it out.

As constituted above, the report includes all of the Facts (events) for each person.  If I had not clicked the boxes in step 6, the list would be only for names of the persons that met the search criteria.

This specific process is not simple.  A similar report can be created with a "Custom Report" but I don't know how to do that at this time.

This wasn't the only thing I learned - maybe I'll share another process next week.

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The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2016/06/creating-list-of-burials-in-specific.html

Copyright (c) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

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7 comments:

L Smith said...

This is a wonderful feature! I haven't used it in Roots Magic yet, but will try it out today. I have used it in my TNG database to create reports of Persons born in Ireland, Persons buried in each of five local cemeteries, and also WWI Soldiers. TNG allows me to publish them as online reports.
http://www.westbrookfieldgenealogy.org/genealogy/reports.php
I could use this feature in Roots Magic when to pull together information for a blog post.
Thank you for your post!

Diana said...

Thank you so much for this post. I am so focused on entering information in Roots Magic, that I forget to explore the useful tools that all that inputting can produce. With this inspiration I will explore this useful feature. Thank you!

Cunningb2 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Cunningb2 said...

Thanks Randy I spend a lot of time doing clean up projects using RootsMagic lists - I hope you will do more of these tutorials ! Thanks Nancy

Joshua Sweatt said...

Great work! I just switched from Legacy 7.5 and am alittle behind on setting it all up. I know how hard it is to keep up with this genealogy efforts. Keep up the good work. Sweatt Genealogy

Unknown said...

I create "Groups" as I enter data for Cemetery, Where Born and Where Died but this Report will catch those that I missed :) - looking forward to your next tip.

Pam Carter said...

Thank you! This is an excellent post. I was just trying to figure out how to do something like this and came across your great explanation. I hope you continue to do more of these tips.