Family Historian User Group

Wow, that is such a powerful tool.

I was inspired after finding Vols 6-13 of the Calendar of Wills for New Jersey via FamilySearch (Google Books and the Internet Archive only had the first five) to renew an interest in Wills.

(And, already, as it turns out, one ancestor was assigned to the wrong brother. She is clearly, with the name of her husband and first child, mentioned in the will of her real father. Correction made.)

What is working for me like greased lightning and sliced butter is I added an icon to everyone for whom I've got a Will event, and then colored the boxes blue for everyone that died in New Jersey. Easy enough to see people who ought to have a Will in the book, but for which I haven't looked for (or found one) yet.

It's astonishingly effective.

For the benefit of others, could you post the Expressions you used, and the settings used to invoke the icon and box colour.

Sure.

Under Diagram, Options, Boxes, I added four conditions:

1) Expression: =ContainsText(%INDI.DEAT.PLAC>%,"New York",STD)

And I gave that a Feature of Box Fill Yellow. (That highlights individuals who's death is recorded somewhere in New York in yellow.)

2) Expression: =ContainsText(%INDI.DEAT.PLAC>%,"New Jersey",STD)

That got Box Fill Light Blue. (Ditto, but blue for New Jersey.)

(The ordinary box is green. So these colors stand out for easy spotting as I go through the diagram.)

(I've got these Calendar of Wills books in pdf format that I can bookmark, highlight, etc.. They're State based, so that's why I'm collecting my folks by color by State. (It's not perfect. It's not a total solution. Not everyone has a death place and I'm not assuming one based on the will.))

3) Expression: =Exists(%INDI.WILL%)

(This just looks for a Will fact. If that's present, an icon is provided below the box.)

That gets a Feature Icon and used a .png I downloaded depicting pen and parchment.)

4) Expression: =Exists(%INDI.EVEN-INTESTATE%)

(Not everyone has a will, but their estate is still recorded in the Calendar when the administrator was appointed, so I created an Intestate Fact and it's treated like a Will for purposes of this exercise.)

That's what worked for me.

Stewart, I am sure that will help some users.

But may I comment and advise on your Expressions testing PLAC names.
Check the Help and you will see the =ContainsText() function matches multiple words in any order and in part-words.
So for example "New York" will match a Place name such as "Canewden, Yorkshire".
A slightly better search string would be "New York," with the comma.
But best is to use =TextPart() function to extract one comma separate part from Place name, and test that equals "New York".
e.g. something like:
=IsTrue(TextPart(%INDI.DEAT.PLAC>℅,3) = "New York")
assuming New York is always in 3rd Place part column.

I now see Parameter 2 of the ContainsText help entry. That seems generously willing to find matches for me. For my specific purposes right now, though, matching by State, up through the late 1600s into the early 1800s, using "New York" "New Jersey" "Maryland" aren't going to result in many mismatches for me.

Trouble with my places list, I don't use extra commas to denote missing data. If I don't know city, or county, (getting a place of birth off the 1850 Census, say) my State is going to be in column one. (And I do not add "United States" or "United Kingdom" relying on there being very few Englands, New Yorks, and so on, so there'd be no expectation on finding a "New York,".

(But I am encouraged to play around with the expressions more.)

I would strongly advise that you do organise Place names into rigid column designations, and add the country.
It will pay dividends in the long run, not only in Expressions, but especially if you want to start geocoding Places.
The extra commas are automatically removed in Diagrams and Reports.

tatewise wrote:I would strongly advise that you do organise Place names into rigid column designation ...

My problem when I started down that road, was that I could never remember how many commas to stick in front of partial names like counties - well, I could work it out, but the extra effort seemed a pain. I found I had to put the initial commas in, because whereas typing "Cheshi" will get an auto-prompt of "Cheshire, England", it won't pick up ", Cheshire, England" - unless anyone knows better, of course. And the initial typing has to include the right numbers of commas and spaces.

So good advice, but I failed, I'm afraid....

Yes, you have to type leading commas and spaces as necessary, but then the auto-completion kicks in for me.
So , Ch should auto-complete with , Cheshire, England.

Are you asking that when you start typing Ch FH should auto-complete with , Cheshire, England once there are no Place names that start with Ch in first column?

tatewise wrote:... Are you asking that when you start typing Ch FH should auto-complete with , Cheshire, England once there are no Place names that start with Ch in first column?

It would be more useful to me if it did - ignore leading commas and spaces when checking for auto-completion. "England" is fine for me to type - ", , England" is not fine. Not for me. I just spent way too long even on that sentence trying to work out how many commas and where the spaces were. I just don't work at that level of knowledge of the pattern.

It doesn't help me to work out things that my American places are 4 nodes and I have a few British places that are 4 nodes as well - for instance, "Chorlton-upon-Medlock, Manchester, Lancashire, England", which I use to remind myself that it's a part of Manchester and not ChorLEY elsewhere in Lancashire.

So far I've not run into serious issues with my non-alignment. Cross-fingers.

I have never found finding an address (PLACe etc) very good when adding it to a fact, especially the predictive side of it. I have 2 strategies:

1. While updating a fact, I keep the records window open on the Places tab. The new filter here is excellent for finding places. Double click the one you want, and as it is highlighted, ctl+C to copy, back to your fact and ctl+V to paste and amend if not exactly what you want. With experimenting with the tab/arrow/etc keys you will find quicker ways to do this. For instance if you get to your fact via a query, it is quicker to get back to it after your ctl+C when you go back to your record via the query; depending on how you get back, tabbing might get you the the place field and select any old text there, saving you the trouble of manually selecting it before ctl+V to replace it.

If added to this you use a clipboard manager like:
Arsclip http://www.joejoesoft.com/vcms/97/
or Ditto http://ditto-cp.sourceforge.net/ (easy autoupdate portable version at http://portableapps.com/apps
you can use it as a recently used or permanent clipboard, saving even more time.

2. For other reasons mentioned in other posts I align my comma separated PLACe details in the "logical" (in my view) way around i.e. country first, then town .... street, hse #. So that when the Place List is displayed it does so in the same "naturally" sorted order, hence much easier to scroll down and find the town and street you want.