Merging source citations details in Family Tree Maker

Even though I don’t like how Ancestry.com created records and sources, I decided to allow it to add a co-lateral branch to my husband’s tree from a 1910 Census record. I wanted to see what I could do to make the Ancestry merge feature work for me.

Even though the Source Citation is exactly the same for each person, Ancestry created a separate source citation for each person and then links that one citation to all the facts for that person. I want only one Source Citation for the entire source linked to the many facts.

In the above example, you see four source citations with the same detail and no citation text. In the lower portion you see the third source citation is tied to one person and four of her facts. I started this process with nine source citations and I want to end up with one source citation that is linked to many facts for multiple people.

Therefore I right click on the first source citation (top portion) and then select Replace Source Citation which then brings up my list of all my individual source citations. I scroll down the list until I find the four I saw above and select one. Please note: FTM will not let you select the one you selected in the previous step, so there is no worry of trying to figure out which one you started with. If you try to select the one you started with, the Ok button will remain grayed out.

After selecting OK, it will prompt if I want to replace “one citation” with “the other citation”. After confirming that it is exactly the same citation I select YES.

I will end up with the following; one source citation for all these facts. The reason behind all this effort is that I want to attach the census image to the source citation and now I only have to attach it once. Yes I could have attached it once to the first source citation of nine I started with and then linked that image to the remaining eight source citations. However, since this is one source, the census record, I want only one source citation tied to all the facts I pulled from that one source.  

Keep in mind; this is just my way of doing this. If you have Family Tree Maker, I would suggest you check out Russ Worthington's Family Tree Maker User blog at http://ftmuser.blogspot.com/. Russ has many examples of how he deals with his sources and citations plus other features of Family Tree Maker.

I have a lot more source citations to clean up and my final step will examine them and verify if they are in Evidence Explained format. If they are not, I will only have one source citation to deal with, instead of the nine that I started with.

How to print Children in Birth Order on a Family Group Sheet in Family Tree Maker

Today I was working on a family from my husband’s tree and went to print out the Family Group sheet and the children were not in birth order but the order I had keyed them into the software program. Family Tree Maker 2014 allows you to view the family in birth order by clicking a small sort button, which I usually always have clicked. It is the one selected in the picture. 

The first step I always do when I have a question is to Google my question and see if anyone else has or had the problem. I knew I could not be the first person to have this problem.

Well I did find that others were having this problem. What I discovered was this is the way the software was designed and thus they stated there was no solution. I beg to disagree on this matter. So I went back to my family view and using the up and down arrows located just to the left of the sort button, I manually moved the children in my family to the proper birth order. Then when I went back to the report, the children now print in the correct order.

However, this could take a long time to manually sort each child in each family. An easier method is to select Tools from the menu, then select "Sort all Children by Birth". A popup box comes up and informs the user "Sorting all children by birth will remove any manual sorting from all families in this tree. Note: Before sorting all children, it is a good idea to backup your file." and then there is an option to check the box to Backup file before sorting. 

I never really noticed before today, that the children were not in birth order. However, I do know that a lot of times, I key in the children in birth order, because I am using a census record as my guide for keying in children names. This is especially true on co-lateral lines but not always on direct lines since it is the direct ancestor that I find first and then based on that fact, I will find siblings of my direct ancestor and start typing them in and not necessarily by birth. 

Lesson learned, check the report before printing and perhaps run the file sorting of children on my database once in a while.