Sunday, March 29, 2009

Working in RootsMagic 4 - Post 3: Adding a Child to a Family

I downloaded the free RootsMagic 4 beta release in early March, and easily uploaded my Family Tree Maker file to it. In this series, I'm looking at different features of RootsMagic 4. I'm not doing a comprehensive review, just looking at features important to me. Previous posts in this series include:

* Working in RootsMagic 4 - Post 1: Navigation
* Working in RootsMagic 4 - Post 2: Editing Person Data

In this post, I am going to add a child to the Frank and Hattie (Hildreth) Seaver family. In the "Family" View, I can click on the row below the last child (it says "+Click to add child" in that row) and a popup box appears:


The box asks me if I want to Add NEW person or Select EXISTING person (already in the database but not connected to these parents). I clicked on "Add NEW person":



The "Add Person box appeared and I entered the child's name, birth date and birth place, and death year and death place to the box. When I typed the place name, the program provided all previous place name entries in my database that started with the typed letters (see above). There is a World icon to the right of the place names - if you click on it you get a list of all of the place names in the database, as shown below:


If you click on the "Online Map" button at the top of this place name box, you can see a Microsoft virtual Earth map of the location.

I selected the death place from the list, then clicked on the "OK" button on the "Add Person" box and saw:


This is the "Edit Person" box for the person just added. I could have added a Note, a Source or Media for this person in this box. I resisted that temptation. To add the person to the family, I clicked on the "Close" button and the child was added to the family:



You can see that Oh-My-God Seaver (1887-1887) has been added to the Frank and Hattie (Hildreth) Seaver family. That was really very easy to do. At some point, I need to figure out how to delete Oh-My-God from the family since s/he is a fictitious person. It should be easy!

The process to Add an unrelated person to the database is just as easy - the user can go to the "Add" menu item and select "Individual" from the drop-down menu and proceed to the "Add Person" menu.

In the next post, we'll start to look at the Report options.

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