Is your Family Tree Maker tree well-trimmed?

Do you have a well-trimmed tree? What do I mean by this? Does your tree just have your relatives or do you have a lot of extra people?

My tree is a little of both and perhaps your tree is too. One thing I like to do is keep track of in-law spouses' parents. If my cousin is married, I want to know who their spouse’s parents are. Why? I have found that my tree, and perhaps yours is similar is like a spider web, where they connect in more than one spot. For example, there is a family who had 10 children, and about 6 of those children have married into my family on various branches. Some have married siblings of one branch, others have married their first cousins or even another branch that isn’t related to the sibling’s branch, and so on.

Therefore, I have changed the way I am keeping these people in my tree. As in the case of the Biel family who had six of their ten children marry into my family, I have that family’s parents and all twelve of their children in my tree. Those branches that connect back to the six children who married into my family is easier to identify because when looking at my tree, I can see the spouse’s parents are entered.

What about the spouse who doesn’t connect to anyone else in my tree? I have decided instead of entering them as additional people in my tree, I use the birth description to enter the following sentence “He/She is/was the son/daughter of father’s name and mother’s name (using the mother’s maiden name). Thus, is might read as follows: He was the son of John J Smith and Jane S Doe.

I am doing this to keep my tree a little better trimmed and visually pleasing, I can see that spouse doesn’t tie back into my tree on another branch, in the tree view above and by the birth description.  Plus, I have been generating books using Family Book Creator, and for the spouse, it will print that birth description as a separate sentence after listing their birth information.

When I enter a spouse, I always check the Index and see if I already that surname in my tree and I quickly check out who their parents are. If I find two siblings in my tree, then I add their parents into my tree and attach each existing child to the parent and clear out the birth description field. If as I am checking for who their parents are and nothing is filled in, then I do a quick search to see if I can figure out who their parents are and determine if they are related to each other.

What do you do to keep your tree well-trimmed?

Remember to have fun and Just Do Genealogy!

Family Tree Maker - Unknown Spouses

 I belong to the Facebook group, Family Tree Maker® Users where they offer a wonderful Guides section. 

Guide 14.08 How to Find All [unknown spouse} is very helpful for cleaning up your tree or just to give you a research project, finding the spouses of these people.

To find all the [unknown spouse]'s in your tree, you need to run the marriage report under the Publish feature of FTM. 

You will find the marriage report under the Relationship Reports category.

You will need to run it for "All Individuals" and you actually need to run it twice. Once with "Sort by wife" unchecked and again with "sort by wife" checked. The first report will be sorted by the husband's names and at the end of the report you will have extra wives listed with no corresponding male. The second report will be sorted by the wife's names and at the end of the report you will extra husband's listed with no corresponding female. 

NOTE: both reports will print the Husband's name in the first column and the wife's name in the second column.

When I ran these reports for my tree, I had fewer husbands with no wives and I decided to start there.

I searched for the person's name and I excepted to find a man who had children and no wife listed. However, I found a single male, with no wife and no apparent marriage fact. 

I decided to switch from the Tree view to the Person view and here I could clearly see there were "shared facts with [unknown spouse]. However, there wasn't any shared facts underneath this heading. 

My solution, I went back to the Tree view and added a spouse named "unknown spouse". 

Then I deleted this newly created spouse, by right clicking on the person and selecting "Delete Person". At the popup box, I press [YES] to delete this person from my tree.

I switched once more to the Person view and the shared facts heading was gone.

Of the 14 males on this list, only two actually had children and thus I had to repeat this process for a total of 12 times. Why this happened, I am perplexed. I do all my data entry in FTM, I don't merge records from Ancestry to my tree. I do sync from FTM to Ancestry. I have been using FTM since version 3 and perhaps during one of the many upgrades over the years, created this situation. It is anyone's guess.

I did find the same situation with my females list. However, not as many in my first dozen names, I only had three. I do have 53 names on my list, so this may take me a little time to get through.

Moral of the story, running these types of reports is a great way to keep our trees clean and from strange situations from creeping into them.

Remember to have fun and Just Do Genealogy!