File Sharing and Brick Walls - Part 7 - Clean Up Notes

This is a continuation of what might be done when sharing information from another researcher. I am using a specific file as an example to help my colleague Randy Seaver of the Genea-Musings Blog. I encourage to follow his side of this story, as well as her other MOST interesting Blog posts.

This next task is to identify everyone in the file who has a Person Note. The issue here is caused by the way GEDCOMs are marked, sent, and received. In this case, my initial review showed extra spaces in the notes. I talked about this here: File Sharing and Brick Walls - Part 4 - Person Review

The easiest way for me to know who has Notes, would be to generate a Custom Report. This report is in the Publish Workspace, Person Collection, and selecting the Custom Report.

Then I want to Name this Report - Custom Report for People with Notes. This naming will help me remember how the report was created, as I will be Selecting ONLY those Persons with Notes. I will be selecting Individuals To Include for this report.

When that button is selected, a "filter" screen will open. There have been other blog posts on this feature. http://ftmuser.blogspot.com/search/label/Filter

On the screen that opens will select "Other", and in the Search Where, will select Any Persons / Fact Notes and keeping "exists". This will move the people who meet that criteria into the Right Hand (RH) Panel.

 In this case there will be 12 people with notes.

Now the only thing we want in this report is the Notes and the Name of the Person. In the RH Panel, there are a number of settings, but for this report, we want to select Items To Include, which is the Left most ICON in the RH Panel.

In the Left side of this screen, normally, there is Name, Birth, Marriage, Death Fact. Each with their own control. We only want the Name. To remove a Fact, select it, and click on the "X" on the right.

In the Right side of thew screen, we want ALL of the Notes that are available. There are Person Notes, Fact Notes, Research Notes, Private Notes, and Relationship Notes. We want all.

 















The report was generated. In this case, it is an 11 page report. 

The names are identified as well as their notes. Some people had long notes, other, not much at all.

Creating a new Task was made to "Clean up Spacing in notes", assigned it to the Clean Up Category, and made it a low priority.

While the Notes are being reviewed / cleaned up, I want to run the Spell Checker on the notes. So that was a second task added, as a clean up, and Low Priority.

There are now 42 Tasks in the List. As I added the Tasks, I cleaned up a couple, and ran the Spell Checker on that set of notes. Those that I cleaned up are marked as Complete.

Control over the Task List has been touched on for FTM2009 here http://ftmuser.blogspot.com/2008/09/family-tree-maker-2009-tasks.html

Lesson Learned: Importing of a GEDCOM may require some clean up of the data. Its so much easier to do BEFORE it is merged with your own data. Leave some time to do this clean up. Don't be in a hurry. (sounds like a voice from experience).



Copyright © 2011 by H R Worthington