Hello Gary,
I use the Rootsmagic program to complement my Ancestry trees. You can upload your Ancestry tree to Rootsmagic and then take advantage of their searching, sorting and listmaking capabilities.
Using your example, if I wanted to find families that lived on a certain street, I would just use the Rootsmagic 'Search Everywhere' feature to look for anywhere that street name appeared in my tree. You can also print a list of everyone that lived in a certain place.
Using the Rootsmagic 'Places' feature, you can go through a gazetteer of all place names in your tree and find ones that are misspelled or wrongly entered. Then pop back to your Ancestry tree in another tab and locate the person whose info you want to make changes to.
It's not as easy as just using one program for everything, but if you like to work in Ancestry, Rootsmagic can help a lot.
There is a free version of Rootsmagic, I believe, but I pay for the full version which is a one-time expense of about $40 US.
Hope this helps!
Grisel
Hello Grisel,
thank you for the (apropos - I think that is correct) suggestion!
Following a suggestion from an early poster, suggesting "PAF" I did some googling and discovered that PAF was discontinued by FamilySearch and appears to have become or was integrated into the RootsMagic software package. I downloaded and installed the trial/free version.
I was going to post a summary, so I hope that you don't mind me using the reply to you to do this.
TL;DR - the advanced search can do
some of the things I would like to be able to do, possibly not everything (but I am still trying to figure it out). Definitely worth adding as a new tool for my research.
This is from an hour or so of playing, so it's only MY take on it. Not meant to cause offence to fans of this software package.
Good
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- Read in the Ancestry GEDCOM without problems.
- Allows person filtering on the "People" page e.g. "Smith, Henry" gives me the wanted list of names. Clicking on a name in the list, then shows full details above, including census address information. Can use the cursor up/down keys to quickly move from record to record. So quick to interactively use (as suggested by the earlier poster).
- Can display a list of all addresses, which has a simple filter. This allowed me to find the Yorkhire misspellings (*)
- It has an advanced person search, albeit with some limitations (up to 6 AND terms - no idea if this can be expanded but it is probably sufficient).
Bad
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- (*) Clicking on an address will not take you to the associated record.
- In the box where full details of a person are given, not all the fields imported from Ancestry are shown (e.g. baptism notes). I am unsure whether this is user configurable.
Examples
1) search for records whch have "Brightholmlee".
I was using a text editor to search for the above place in the raw GEDCOM and noticed that he text is included in the note part of the baptism records (transcribed from the scans). I was able to use "advanced person search" with Brightholmlee selected for "any" field. The filter did work. I could move easily to the associated records, however in the "People" window where all someones details/records are shown, the baptism text (which was matched to) is not displayed. Again this may be configurable.
2) search for Henry Smith with a father called John who lived in Church Street.
I am pretty sure that the search allows the address to be matched on. Yep <<Residence place contains "Church">> Warning - when changing search the default match criteria gets changed to "equals" for stings, whereas I would always use "contains". I do not know if you can add a family relationship. To be determined. I plan to see if RootsMagic have a user forum, and if so I will register and ask there.
Thanks once again for the suggestion. I can see that RootsMagic is a very useful tool to have.
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