Family Tree Maker Hints – Burial Date

I have been working on a family book for my sister-in-law. Actually, it’s an updated version of the book I created last year. Last year, in the spring, we started on her mother’s maiden name family tree. Someone gave her a binder with computer pages that looked like it was generated through Family Tree Maker. This book appeared to be created in the early 2000’s.

Anyway, my sister-in-law was in charged of the family reunion which they held in August of last year. Thus, I had a pressing time table. I didn’t get as much time as I would like to proof read the book. I created the book using the plugin “Family Book Creator.”

In my opinion, FBC is a wonderful tool for generating books. It has many options and I have only used it a couple of times, as an experiment to see what it does and it was quite a few years ago.

Anyway, fast forward to today. I have entered corrections and new information into my FTM software and generated the book. Even though FBC has many options, there are some things I would like to do differently. Such as, the graphical tree that it can include, I like it for the primary person and the 1st generation of children, however, I wish I could turn it off for the remainder of the book. My work around, I manually remove all the graphical trees that I don’t want in the Word document that it creates. This reduces the size of my book, dramatically.

Thus, before I go to all the work of removing these trees, I thought perhaps I need to really look over the book I created last year and see if there are any obvious things I need to fix.  

One of the things that really popped out at me was that sometimes the burial information would print before the death information. Being a programmer, I quickly saw that it was controlled by the date of the two events. Therefore, if I inputted a death date of Oct 24, 2021 and a burial date of Oct 30, 2021 then it printed in the correct order. However, if I inputted a death date of Oct 24, 2021 and a burial date of 2021 or Oct 2021, then it would sort the burial first, based on date and print that information in the paragraph first. It was like a “spoiler alert” because I reported where they are buried and then tell you about their death.

To fix this problem: Create a Filter

I returned to FTM. The challenge is how do I identify all the people who have incomplete death dates. On FTM, located beneath the Index, you will find a Filter option. When I click on that option, a filter screen will display. I click on Filter In…> and then click the All Facts option.  I use the drop-down arrow next to the Search where and select Burial. Then, next to Burial using the drop-down arrow I select Is not blank, then Okay. Next click Apply. The index will now only display those people who match my filter.   Then I click on the first person in the Index.

This person should have a Burial date. I will skip those that have a complete date and clear out the date for those people who have no date. Thus, I can use the down arrow to move through the list. I use my mouse to highlight the Burial date for incomplete dates and then press the delete key. I will need to click on that person’s name again in the index. I keep repeating this process until I am through the list of names. 

When I am done with this list, uncheck the Apply and the filter will go away and you are left with your normal Index view.

I will be sharing more hints as I work my way through the book. Next I will share a how to identify all those people who have a burial place but no Cemetery location, if you record the Cemetery name in the Description field.

Remember to have fun and Just do Genealogy!