Are you looking for a genealogical program to keep
track of your family tree and you don't want it to be online?
Well, have you considered using the program RootsMagic? Today,
I'm going to tell you five reasons why I like the program
RootsMagic.
Howdy, I'm Devon Noel Lee and this is Family History
Fanatics. I have been a long-time user of RootsMagic
primarily because it connects with family research and that
is my online favorite place to work with keep track of my data
and it also helps me to do some LDS research that other
programs can't do and so Roots Magic has been my preference
for that reason. I also find that RootsMagic is fairly
affordable. You can get Roots Magic Essentials for free to
try that out, see if you like it, and then if you need some
of the more advanced tools that RootsMagic has available to
you, then the program is anywhere from 20 to $30
depending on when you get it on sale. The number one reason why
I use RootsMagic is to keep track of the living. I do not
like to share the information of living relatives online.
Now, I know millennials don't care so much. They'll share
just about anything and some people feel comfortable
creating private spaces in order to share the lives of the
living but I don't share the lives of the living online. If
it you put it online, somebody can get to it and so I don't
want to be responsible for the genealogical information of my
living relatives. So, in Roots Magic, I keep track of the
living in that way. The second reason why I like RootsMagic
is for helping me to write using their timelines. When you
get to an individual on Roots Magic, you see a number of
these tabs up here at the top to help you change the contents
and the way it is organized. The pedigree chart, the family
group sheets where you have the husband, the father, the
mother, the children, and then the parents of the father and
mother up here. What I really like is this last one called
timeline. In timeline, I can see all of the events in the
lives of this particular ancestor. His events are bolded
so birth a residence event you can see military draft record
his death burial and so forth what I also love is these blue
ones the names are blue and the facts are this is the death of
a sibling and the birth of a sibling and it is kind of wonky
that if two facts happen on the same day sometimes the birth
appear before the death but you know biologically that didn't
happen it's just a little quirk in the program but in any case
I have the birth and the death of a sibling another birth and
the death of this a different sibling the birth of a spouse
that's that's kind of interesting when his sibling
married birth of his children death of a child death of a
father and so on and so forth and what this timeline done is
is allows me to help write what is taking place in the year
eighteen eighty seven and how old was he he was one it will
calculate to the month when these facts took place so if
his birthday was actually in March it would not have been
seven years it would have been six years from his birth to
this birth of his spouse so RootsMagic will get down to
the month of when the age I really like that but the other
really cool thing is when you're writing you don't have
to hop around the program, you can come over and see the notes
that you have created. The cause of the death of his
sibling was spasms that was the note I had created and I also
can access the source information, the Green Lawn
Cemetery Records and the family records and so forth. So,
whatever I have put into the program, these notes I can
check out. So, in this case, he was listed with an alternate
spelling in a record and here's the citation, the city
directory. So, I really really like RootsMagic to help me
write because it curates everything into a timeline and
I can easily access the notes and the sources from one screen
that will help me to write the story about Joseph placing him
in the context of his family. Something I teach about quite
often in my book, A Recipe for Writing Family History. You can
learn more about that program down in the description below.
The third reason why I like RootsMagic is that this
program makes it very easy for me to organize my media files.
All of this scanned images and documents that pertain to my
ancestor. Let me show you what it looks like in RootsMagic
and then let me show you what it looks like in the back end
where I save my files and you can see just how simple this
program has made my organization process. So, I'm
going to go back to the profile page of George. I'm going to
click on family. I'm going to double click on his name and
then I'm going to come up here to the top and click on media.
When I click on media, I see all of the digital files that I
have connected to George using RootsMagic. As you make
connections to different records in your program, then
you can tag everyone that is listed on your records and not
only that, it simplifies my organizations. Let's go see
what it actually looks like on my computer. Here I have my
genealogy folder. I have my brown family and my geistler
and some other thing projects that I work on then I divide it
into documents and notice I just throw every newspaper file
I find into my newspaper folder. Here are some newspaper
clippings. All of my immigration related files are
dumped into here Bible records dumped into here and I don't
have to create family file folders on my computer and then
make shortcuts and duplicate copies of the same images into
all of these different files. Over in RootsMagic, I just I
have one image. It's tags for everybody rather than copied
into everybody's folder. It's pretty amazing in that way and
then over in my photos, I've organized it however makes
sense to me and then if I want to tag more images in here like
this one or that one then I just bring it over into the
program so I love that it simplifies the back end of my
program so I'm not as organized as many people would think the
fourth reason why I liked Roots Magic it has the potential to
be one hub for me to access numerous websites and the hints
that they provide and then curate all of those hints into
one location that there are these flow light bulbs and in
those light bulbs here's a light bulb for his father or
you can see that I have hints from family search find my path
my heritage I can also have hints for ancestry but I'll
tell you why I don't at in a moment but from this portal
page I can see that I have 11 hints to pending and nine
confirm I can double click on the hint and it will take me to
the website that related. I could log in and it will show
me all of the hints that Roots Magic has found for me and then
I can accept or reject them. The one thing I don't like
right now is the tree share feature. If I go to TreeShare,
I have to either upload a new tree to ancestry and turn on
the hints or I need to download my tree from Ancestry to Roots
Magic but if I have an existing large database like this one
here, I have great difficulty in making a simplified
connection. RootsMagic has the potential to be the one-stop
place to go and find all of the hints for the big four online
genealogy programs but it's not quite there yet. The fifth
reason why I really like Roots Magic is because it is a great
way to analyze my tree. Roots Magic will go and investigate
the data that you put into the program and flag you when there
is a problem but what I really like is it curates all of the
problems into one spot. It can also help me develop research
questions and plans in order to tackle the family tree
depending on how large I decide to make it and I can also do
some cleanup work. Let me show you three of those tools and
resources that I'm talking about. So, let's go back to
George. Geisler, it really doesn't matter where you click.
I just like to have him looking handsome right there. We're
going to click on tools. We're going to click on problem
search and click on the words problem list. It will open up a
form. I can customize it but let me just run it as it. You
can see some of the problems that come up. RootsMagic found
that John Herbert Daniels was born after his parents were
married. So, person is are married after person's birth.
Now, it's entirely possible that that happens. People don't
always follow the form strategy but it is something to
investigate. If I discover that John Daniels is not a problem,
I can mark em as not a problem and remove him from this list
but you can see some of the problems that I can encounter
and it helps me clean up my tree. Some of the other things
you can go and investigate are missing information. I'm
going to come to list and then I like the search box. I'm
going to type missing and find this list fit this report
missing information list and click report and then come to
birth and put a check mark on it and generate the report and
now, you can see that I have a list of everyone that is in my
database that is missing a birth events Now, some have a
birthplace and no dates but that's it definitely gives me
the opportunity to to do some research and to know what to
research and finally, I really like to clean up the places in
the database. You come up to list, go to place list, and if
we just come down here to Franklin Franklin, Franklin,
and Franklin. All of these Franklin are Franklin's are
counties in Ohio but there is no reason that why I need to
have Franklin without an ill, Franklin without United States
and then the two variations down here. Um RootsMagic
allows me to clean up my database submerge all of these
together and create one entry. I could click merge and have it
disappear. So, there you have my five reasons why I use Roots
Magic and how I use it offline. Share with me in the comment
section below what you like about RootsMagic and if you
want, you can also share some of the limiting factors of
RootsMagic and alternatives for the program that solves
those limits.