#52Ancestors #Groups

When entering details about an acestor’s life, do you use a ‘member’ fact? I do – sometimes. But if I were grading myself on the use of this fact, I would probably give myself a ‘D’. Since I do use the fact, I don’t deserve an ‘F’. However, my usage is very inconsistent.

For example, my grandmother, Winnie Currey Crawford was a member of the Old-Timers club in Dodge City. Growing up, I remember her talking about either hosting or attending Old-Timers meetings. I’ve even written a blog post about the Old-Timers club. Grandma was also a member of the East Side Bible class. However, my grandmother does not have a ‘member’ fact for either of these organizations.

I admit that I’m a bit lazy with the use of this fact. I think another issue I have with this fact is the process of assigning a date. I don’t know when my grandmother joined these organizations. Thus, I don’t have a ‘beginning’ date. Her participation was also over a span of years.

In preparing for this post, I also discovered that, at times, I don’t provide enough information when entering the fact. If the description field is left blank, then the sentence created for the fact is meaningless.

This also impacts a ‘Fact List’ report. Without the details that should be in the description, the report just gives the place. The ‘fact list’ report is under the ‘Lists’ section of reports in RootsMagic 7.

Creating a fact list report for the member fact is relatively simple. I just selected the member fact and then generated the report.

This produced an 8 page report. Below is a sample of that report showing both facts with sufficient information along with facts that do not have enough information.

Since I am previewing RootsMagic 8, I decided to see how this works in RM8. Instead of going to the ‘Reports’ menu at the top of RM7, I need to use the ‘Publish’ menu down the left side of RM8.

Based on my limited experience in RM8, I believe the Publish screen shows 4 of the reports I’ve recently used. Since the Fact List report does not show, I need to click on ‘All Reports and Charts’.

That opens a screen showing all of the available reports. From here, I selected Fact List.

Instead of opening a separate window for the report options, they appear on the left side of the screen. Again, I need to select the fact type, ‘member’. Clicking on the > to the right of the ‘birth’ fact type opens a window where I can scroll down to locate the Member fact.

Clicking OK on the window changes the ‘fact type’ in the settings for the report to Member. I then removed the check mark from Print Private Facts and from Print Preparer Info.

Once the settings are configured to my wishes, I click the Generate report button at the bottom of the column. This report appears in the large space to the right of the report settings.

When I look at the same area of the report as in RM7 (Washington Marion Crawford, etc.), the major difference is that every other member fact is highlighted blue.

Magic didn’t happen in RM8. I’m still missing the description information for William Clay Craford’s member facts. I’m not sure whether the highlighting affected the spacing or whether a different font and font size was used, but the report is 13 pages long in RM8 compared to the 8 pages in RM7.

This experiment with the Member Fact list report

• Revealed my laziness in entering this type of fact
• Revealed member facts that are missing descriptive details
• Helped me realize that the process of creating reports in RootsMagic 8 is similar to that in RM7. It just looks different.

My to-do list just got a bit longer.