Using Drag and Drop in RootsMagic

welcome in this short video we're going to talk about dragging and dropping people from one rootsMagic database into another file now this can be useful for several reasons one it can be useful if you want to bring a part of a database into a new database it can also be useful when comparing two files and you want to bring just a piece of one of those files into the other file so let's just jump right in and kind of show you some examples the first thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna have my own database up on the screen but I'm gonna go up here and create a new rootsMagic file so I'm gonna come up and I'm just gonna give it a name I'm just gonna call this one test and when I create this new database it's going to open this database side-by-side with mind now I'm gonna collapse these little side lists I'm gonna click that little button just so we have a little bit more room to view what I'm actually doing here okay this first thing what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take this Howard Smith and a few generations of his ancestors to bring them over into this new database so all I have to do is click with my mouse button on Howard and while I'm holding it down drag it to this other database and when I do that rootsMagic is going to ask me who do you want to copy to the other database in this case I'm going to say I want his ancestors and their children now we'll come back to this screen to kind of talk about what each of these options are but for this time we're going to do ancestors and their children and I'm just going to do three generations now you can do as many generations as you want you can pick a number that's larger than the number of generations you actually have in order to get all of those generations but in this case I mainly want Howard's jr. Howard senior and his wife and then the grandparents and then the children in each of those families so I'm going to go ahead and click OK rootsMagic is going to copy them over now one thing you'll notice is even though I brought Howard Smith jr. over he's not that starting person in this new database that's because rootsMagic uses the person with the lowest record number as that starting person when you add them to a new database so if I want Howard to be this starting person over here I need to select this database make sure it's the selected one by clicking on it and then come up here to tools and then down to file options and I want to set Howard Smith jr. as the root person so I'm going to go ahead and click on that I'm gonna pick Howard's Howard Smith jr. right there that's the person I want to be the root person and select him he's now showing he's the new root person and click OK now even though I said him as the root person it doesn't automatically switch to him at this time he will be the one that comes up automatically anytime I open this file on the feet in the future but if I want to set him right now what I can do is say search and go to the root person or I can press ctrl home and so there we now have Howard Smith jr. his parents and his grandparents and we have the children in each of those families as well now all the information is there so if I double click on Howard here I will see that information there next to or Howard Smith that senior I can come over here to Howard Smith senior over here and it's this exact same information when I drag and drop people or groups of people everything about those people transfers over their names their events dates places their notes their sources their media items you'll notice the little picture comes up for them as well everything comes over when you bring bring the people over using drag and drop now as I mentioned another useful purpose for drag and drop is when you have two files and you want to bring part of one of those files over into an existing file so for example let's say that this particular file is one that I've been working on and this is one that I created a new rootsMagic file and imported a gedcom or something in other words this is data that somebody maybe has sent me and I noticed that I have James Smith and that this file over here has James Smith but it also has additional ancestors out there that I would like for mine as well so what I can do is I can click on James Smith in this one and drag and instead of just dropping him anywhere I drop him on James Smith over here when I do that again exact same screen what do I want to do and I'm just gonna say ancestors I'm gonna leave the children out at this time and you'll see why in a little bit I'm not going to put the children and I just want James Smith and his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and so on now there's a new thing you're gonna see here and then that's this option and it's asking our James Smith 125 I don't have the record numbers turned on but it's saying is this James Smith and this James Smith the same person and if they are I want to check that because if I check that roots Magic's going to merge those two records for me so what it's going to be doing is copying James Smith and all of his ancestors into this database but then instead of just leaving them floating as a tree it's going to merge this James Smith with this James Smith to connect the new tree up I'm gonna go ahead and click OK and there we go it copied 51 people so there's quite a few ancestors out there and it merge them in so now I have this particular line now this is very useful when you have two databases that may be similar and but you want to kind of combine them without just combining the entire databases and then having to do merging the rest of your life it lets you pick and choose individual lines to bring over into your own database now I'm going to come up here to Jane this Jane Smith the senior James Smith and the reason I'm going to do this is I'm going to switch to the family view for each of these and this is why I didn't bring all the children over because I wanted to show that drag and drop works from any of these views you're not limited to doing that just from that pedigree view so if I'm looking at two families James and Betsey Meade and I see that oh I've got children over here that I don't have in my database I can just click on Henriette Smith and drag her over and drop her and who do I want a copy I can say just Henriette Smith or I could pick if she happened to have other other spouses and whatever I can select those people as well but then it's going to say is Henriette Smith the child of James and Betsey and I'm gonna say yep and by doing that it's saying if you check this rootsMagic is going to automatically add her as a child in this family so I'm gonna say okay it brings her over as a child in this family and I can do the same thing with others as well I can click over there and I can say just him yes he's a child and so instead of having to go in and retype that person I can just drag and drop them over now you'll notice that it's just adding them to the end of the children list so once I've brought all of the children over I will want to rearrange them in the proper order and I can do that by clicking that little up and down arrow and then that'll let me rearrange them and I can drag and drop them in the proper order or I can just say sort by birth date it will sort them by the birth they click OK and now they're rearranged and so now I have Henrietta William and James Henrietta William and then James down here and I can do that with each of the rest of the children okay so I am going to actually delete this this database right here because we're gonna start with a new one so I'm going to delete this file right here get back to our original place and what we're going to do is we're going to create a new another new database and we'll just call this one test again since we just deleted that but that way we're starting with a new blank database and we're going to kind of go over a couple of options I'm just going to click anybody it doesn't really matter who I click and drag and drop to get this let's go over some of the options that you have when drag and drop you can copy just the one person that's what we were doing when we were dragging children over one at a time we can we can do the ancestors of that person or we can do the ancestors and their children we can also do the descendants of that person so we could pick somebody farther out and bring them and their children grandchildren and great-grandchildren and then we can choose whether or not we want to include spouses everyone in the same tree that basically is going to take everybody that's connected to Howard Smith jr. now often that's your entire database but you may have little trees floating around in your database and you want to create a new file that doesn't have all of those small little trees floating around that's where this can be useful everyone in the same tree everyone in the database okay in other words this is basically going to make a copy of your file it's going to select everybody that's in that database and bring them over into the new database that actually can be useful if you ever get corruption in your file now the first thing to try is if you if you ever get corruption in your database is under the file menu there's an option called database tools and we have another short video that talks about those tools so that's always the first thing to try if that doesn't work kind of a last resort type of option is to create a new blank database and drag and drop your entire database into that new one the the process of drag and drop dropping people does some cleanup so it you can often remove corruption from a database by using drag and drop and selecting every one in the file the last option let me select people from a list and this is like the power option this is where you can select any group of people that you want from this file to bring them into the database they don't even have to be connected together we'll just do a short little example I'm going to go ahead and click OK and I could just go select random people I could just go down here and say these are the people those people I want in the database but I'm gonna use the tools up here to mark a group of people I can mark just a family again I've got some of the same options I had before ancestors and descendants you have genetic lines if you want to bring just a genetic line into the new file but this is the one we're going to do select people by data fields and this is going to bring up the criteria screen where you can select basically any kind of group of people so I'm just gonna go quickly and I'm going to say I want to copy everybody whose birth place contains Iowa and then I could say and or you know their birth date or death date is after this or their name is let's surname and Smith or whatever I can get as fancy as I want with this criteria I'm gonna select ok it is marked forty-seven people that were born in Iowa and I'm gonna say okay and that's all I had to do and now I have a database over here with just people that were born in Iowa and I may have multiple if I go up to the tools and say count the trees you'll see I have a bunch of trees at one tree that has 22 people in it that we're all born in Iowa and then I have many smaller ones and this is what I was talking about when I said you might have a bunch of little trees you want to get rid of that's where that other option about only the people in that one tree is all you're going to copy and that is a brief demonstration of how to use drag-and-drop to copy a person or multiple people from one rootsMagic file into another one

Channel: RootsMagic

Views: 20,427

Rating: 4.9529409 out of 5

Keywords: RootsMagic, Drag and Drop

Id: -dLBU_Tx9t8

Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2013