Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

It’s Saturday Night again –

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along – cue the Mission Impossible music!):

1)  Have you created a Problem report from your desktop genealogy software program?  Tell us which software you’re using, how you found the “Problem Report,” and your results using it.

Like Randy, I use RootsMagic 9. Thus, there are a variety of ‘problems’ one can search one’s database for.

Not only is there a variety of ‘problems’ one can search for, but I can pull down ‘everyone’ and select a portion of my database. Since I have my database color coded by branches, I can run the tool for a particular branch of my tree

While it might be tempting to ‘check all’ and run this tool, my large database would generate so many problems it would be overwhelming. For example, selecting ‘Person is missing a primary surname’ generates a long list of ‘problems’.

In some cases, the surname is blank when ‘standards’ suggest the use of five underline characters for the surname. Following this ‘standard’ prevents an individual from showing on this list of ‘problems’. In other cases, the surname is part of the given name. While cleaning up this one problem will take some time, putting in the ‘underlines’ or splitting the name removes the individual from the problem list.

Thanks Randy for this challenge. Now, I need to spend teh time working thru all of the problems in my database!