Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Dear Randy: Can I Make a Kinship Report in RootsMagic?

A society colleague asked me how she could make a Kinship Report in RootsMagic recently.  I knew there was a "Kinship Report" but I had never tried to use it.

1)  In RootsMagic, I clicked on the Report menu item and saw the dropdown menu:


2)  I clicked on the "Lists" item and saw the selection:


"Kinship List" is one of the available lists.

3)  I clicked on the "Kinship List" and saw the "Report Settings" screen.  I kept myself as the "Start person:"

There were no other options as far as content.

4)  I clicked on "Generate Report and it took over a minute to provide a list of the 47,000 persons in my RootsMagic database with whom I have a relationship.  Here is the top of the list:

Note: The "Relative" name is not listed because the database persons without a name are listed first in alphabetical order.

The last page - page 809 - is below:

Yep, 809 pages listed alphabetically.  So I have to know who I'm looking for in order to find my relationship to them.  There are easier ways to find that out!

5)  What I would love to see as a "Kinship List" is the ability to pick a relationship and get the list of persons in the database that are exactly that relationship, or closer.  For instance, if I specified a relationship of "fourth cousin" from a dropdown menu, it would show me a list of fourth cousins, third cousins, second cousins, first cousins, with all the removeds in a sorted list.  My preference would be that the list would group all first cousins together, all second cousins together, etc.  That would be a very useful Kinship List, I think.

Such a Kinship List would take some time to create and order the results, but would it be longer than the present time it takes to create my 809 page Kinship List?  It might, and that's OK with me, since I would be getting what I want.

6)  So the answer to my colleague is:  Yes, there is a Kinship List, but it's not easy to use.

7)  Can Legacy Family Tree or Family Tree Maker make a Kinship List they way I want it, as described in 5) above?  If so, please show me how to do it.

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2 comments:

Lois Willis said...

You can create a report similar to what you are wanting using Legacy Family Tree and Microsoft Excel. I have set up a post with instructions: Creating a relationship report using Legacy Family Tree and Microsoft Excel

WayneyP said...

5+ years later and I found myself asking the same question. A quick search led to this post. So, I ran the report and got to thinking. If I save it in .xlsx format and open it as a spreadsheet I could then sort the list and group all the relationship types together. Then it's a matter of finding first cousin. Actually, I'm not sure about Excel but in Open Office Calc, there's a filter drop down arrow on the column heading. So I can use that to locate first cousin and it only displays that relationship. You'd think they'd have a built in option to show just specific relationship types in RM.