Heartland Genealogy

I'm writing in response to Russ Worthington 's comment on the Genea-Musing's blog post, When Did Ancestry.com Last Index Ancestry Member Trees ? In the comment, Russ brings up the issue of hints not showing. Since I haven't noticed an issue with 'missing' hints on my un-indexed tree, Russ's post made me question whether I was indeed missing hints. However, I did notice one difference between my tree and Russ's experiment. I work with a public tree and Russ' test was with a private tree. Thus, I wanted to know whether public trees produced hints when the tree lacked Ancestry sources. Thus, I needed a public tree (small) without Ancestry sources. Since I've been searching for Judson Crawford to see if my tree was indexed, I decided to create a small public tree on Ancestry for Judson Crawford, his wife, children and parents.  My first attempt at creating the tree was to drag Judson and his family into a new tree. When I tried to use TreeS...

Thanks to the help of users on the RootsMagic Discussion Forum , I have figured out some of my issues with my narrative report and learned a formatting trick. One of my issues was with the first letter of a few sentences not being capitalized. When I looked at the sentence structure for these facts, I discovered that the 'person' field wasn't capitalized in the template: [person] lived< [PlaceDetails:Plain]>< [Place]>< [Date]>. When I capitalized the 'Person' field, then the sentence began with a capital letter in the narrative report. According to the forum discussion , the capitalization of the 'person' field should not affect the sentences. Thus, I didn't go thru my various fact types and change all of the [person] fields to [Person]. I'm guessing that I did something to the sentence structure for these few sentences that kept them from formatting correctly. Since my 'work-around' (capitalizing the 'person'...

As a former user of The Master Genealogist, I expect my current genealogy software to take the sentences created by each event and build a narration for an individual's life. Unfortunately, I still have a lot to learn about the way RootsMagic builds the narrative report. Thanks to information posted in the RootsMagic Community Forum , I did figure out how to create paragraphs (i.e. some white space). I elected to customize the sentence where I wanted a new paragraph by adding two carriage returns at the beginning of the sentence. Those two carriage returns create a blank line before the sentence. Now, I need to figure out how to resolve several other issues: The first letter is not capitalized for some sentences (see second paragraph above) In many cases, there doesn't appear to be a space between the superscript at the end of one sentence and the first letter of the next sentence. Hopefully, the forum will help me figure out how to resolve these issues.

During the last few years of my career in teaching, I was required to write SMART Goals. Even though I did not excel at writing those goals, I think about the acronym (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) when considering genealogy goals. Although I haven't written my 2018 genealogy goals in true SMART goal fashion, I have broken a broad goal of 'researching my family history' into smaller more specific tasks. With these smaller goals, I will be able to check them off within the next year (hopefully). Although I'm always working on my broad 'research my family history goal', I hope to be better at being able to 'measure' my progress in 2018. Thus, I need to establish my 'baseline' or beginning stats for 2018. RootsMagic 11,269 People 3,744 Families 29,407 Events 3,215 Sources 39,752 Citations Ancestry 11,257 People 2,095 Photos 99 Stories 1,753 Records 1,105 People with Hints 8,151 Total Hints 6,541 Rec...

While thinking about my goals for 2018, I started thinking about what I've accomplished during 2017. Since I didn't record statistics from my tree, I can't 'brag' about the number of ancestors added. However, I have learned a lot during 2017. In January, I learned all about Bullet Journaling thanks to a Wacky Wednesday hangout sponsored by DearMyrtle . Even though I had tried various planners during my career, I failed to consistently use a planner. I wasn't even good at checking Google calendar, let alone getting everything into an online calendar. However, I did create and use a bullet journal for 2017 and have started one for 2018! During the spring of 2017, I applied to become a beta tester for RootsMagic's tree share feature. Around the middle of May, I was accepted as a beta tester and spent the next month working with uploading segments of my tree to Ancestry and playing with the various features to help RootsMagic find and fix errors. When the ...