RootsMagic Review - 5 Things I Love

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 [Music] howdy I'm Devin the well.we and this is a family history fanatics I have been a longtime user of roots magic 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 roots magic 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 twenty to thirty dollars depending on when you get it on sale the number one reason why I use roots magic 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 don't share just about anything and some people feel comfortable creating private spaces in order to share the lives of living but I don't share the lives of the living online if 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 roots magic 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 content and the way it is organized the pedigree chart the family group sheets where you have the husband the father the mother their 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 life's of this particular ancestor his events are bolded so birth of 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 italicized 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 appears 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 just a different sibling the birth of his spell that sucks 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 it allows me to help write what is taking place in the year 1887 and how old was he he was one it will calculate to the months 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 roots magic we'll get down to the month of when the age I really like that but the other really cool thing that's when you're writing you don't have to hop around in 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 source citation the city too Factory 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 their 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 backend 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 every one that is listed on your records and not only that it simplifies my organization 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 guys learned some other things projects that I work on then I divided 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 its tax 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 it makes sense to me and then if I want to track 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 backend of my program so I'm not as organized as many people would think the fourth reason why I likes Brutes 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 little 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 in a moment but from this portal page I can see that I have 11 hints two pending and nine confirmed I can double click on the hint and it will take me to the website that is related I could log in and it will show me all of the hints that rootsMagic 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 tree share 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 rootsMagic 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 for online genealogy program 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 rootsMagic we'll go and investigate the data that you've put into the program and flag you when there is a problem but what I really like is it creates 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 guys so 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 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 intimate parents 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 Markham has not a problem in 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 gonna come to list and then I like the search box I'm a type missing and find this list that this report missing information list and click report and then come to birth I put a checkmark 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 event now some have a birthplace and no dates but that it definitely gives me the opportunity T 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 needs and not why I need to have Franklin without an ell Franklin without United States and then the two variations down here who 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 rootsMagic and how I use it offline share with me in the comment section below what you liked about rootsMagic and if you want you can also share some of the women's team factors of rootsMagic and alternatives for the program that solves those limits [Music]

Channel: Family History Fanatics

Views: 23,629

Rating: 4.8801088 out of 5

Keywords: genealogy, family history, family tree, ancestry, family search, rootsmagic, genealogy software, rootsmagic tutorial, rootsmagic 7, rootsmagic and ancestry, rootsmagic and familysearch, rootsmagic essentials, rootsmagic review, rootsmagic review five things I love, product review, top five

Id: ubCvf8hZcM8

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 08 2018