Have you ever wondered which of your relatives served during the civil war? Or have you wondered who served for which side? I can tell you which of my 2nd great grandfathers served, but I don’t have information about their siblings or cousins stored in my brain.

Thus, I decided to try and create a list of everyone for whom I have a military service fact during the civil war using my genealogy software program, RootsMagic 7.

The first step to creating this list is to create a marked group. To do that, I click on the icon above the index of people that (at least to me) looks like a folder with people poking out.

Clicking on that icon changes the screen from a list of people (Index) to a list of Groups. The top of this list contains a pull down box that allows me to select the group. Once a group is selected, the members of the group are displayed. To the right of the drop down menu is the group icon.

Clicking on this icon to the right of the drop down menu opens up the ‘Named Group’ window. This window has buttons to manage the groups, including the ‘New’ button.

Clicking the ‘New’ button on the NAMED GROUPS window opens the SELECT PEOPLE window. I can manually go thru and select people to create a group. However, most of the time, I’m not certain whom to put in a group and rely on the computer to search for people to add to a group. To do this, I click on the MARK GROUP button.

When I click on MARK GROUP a menu appears.

For this project, I want to use the “Select people by data fields” option. Clicking on that option opens a window where I can search for information.

This is where I have to think like the computer program and build my statements to pull out the people I want. Since this project involves locating individuals who served during the civil war, I’m going to use the MILITARY fact DATE to build my search criteria.

When I clicked OK, RootsMagic searched my database and found 76 people which it marked. Clicking OK on the SELECT PEOPLE window opens a window to ENTER NAME FOR THE GROUP.

Now, I can switch to that group and browse thru the list of members.

Now that I have marked those with a military fact between 1860 and 1867, I can print a report. The ‘Individual List’ report allows me to print a list of these people and include their spouses.

However, that report isn’t very informative. Using the ‘Fact List’ report, I can print a list of these individuals along with their military facts. To create this report, I have to indicate that I want a list of people with a military fact. Then I want to narrow the list down to just those people in the ‘Military Civil War’ group.

This creates a report showing their name and each of their military facts. The date and description/place associated with the military fact is displayed.

Not only do I have a list of those who served during the civil war, I can see that I have some ‘clean-up’ to do with these facts. For example, I often customized the sentence to use the words enlisted or discharged.

This customization does not appear on the fact list report. Thus, my report isn’t very informative. To improve my ability to pull this information, I need to put this information in the description field and then use the description in the sentence.

By doing that, I get a more detailed sentence.

This small change also impacts the Fact List report. I now have the word enlisted appearing on the report.

Now, I just need to work my way thru the individuals in my marked group to make sure their military facts include details in the description.