I don’t know about you, but when it comes to my genealogy skills, I feel like I am constantly learning and sometimes, re-learning? I’m currently ‘re-learning’ about ‘alternate names.’
Thanks to a post in the RootsMagic Users Facebook group about the ‘Alternate Name’ fact, I’ve been prompted to evaluate how I deal with married names.
When I migrated my data from The Master Genealogist (TMG) to RootsMagic, the ‘Name-Marr’ event from TMG was automatically converted to the ‘Alternate Name’ fact in Roots Magic.
However, I didn’t do a good job of learning about my new software since I didn’t realize the correlation between the ‘Name-Marr’ and ‘Alternate Name’ facts. Nor did I realize that I had to create the fact for a female when adding a spouse.
After reading the FB post, I am going back to make sure the I have added the Alternate Name Fact — especially for my direct lines. As I’ve been working thru this, I also realized that my ‘INDEX’ list was not showing those names. This was a ‘simple’ fix in that I only had to pull down the OPTIONS button and place a check by ‘Show Alternate Names’
In order to make it easier to make these changes, I wanted to create a list of those needing an ‘Alternate Name’ fact added. For the most part, this would be females who were married but who do not have the ‘Alternate Name’ fact. I couldn’t figure out how to create a marked list with that list of criteria. However, I was able to create a marked list for females who have a marriage record and called the list ‘Married Female’.
Using this marked group, I was then able to create a ‘FACT LIST’ report for people missing the ‘Alternate Name’ Fact.
Now, I have a list of women who need to have an ‘Alternate Name’ fact added. I can now slowly work my way thru this report. Even though this will take some time to add the Alternate Name fact where appropriate, I am thankful to the users on the RootsMagic Users Facebook group for discussing this fact.