Tricks and Tips in dealing with lists and data

For Information specific to finding Census film and for film # of Waterloo, Ont Census go Here.

Avoiding those pay for use traps Creating web pages (with MS word)

The Family Search site from The Latter-day Saints has a great deal of information, one area is the International Genealogical Index, which contains two types of records. 1) those submitted by individuals. 2) Those extracted from Parish records or Bishops transcripts. I have found the second to be more reliable than the first, however ALL the records should be check at the original source if possible.

Here are a couple of tricks to make finding those records that you are seeking easer to view.

Often we wish to get a list of all the family born in a particular area and this is usually found in the parish records. To get such a list from the IGI record do the following:-

First search the IGI for an individual that you know was born in a particular area and locate them on the list. Open that record and look at the notes at the bottom, if it says “Extracted birth or christening record for locality listed in the record.” then this is part of a larger list. Make a note of the BATCH # listed at the bottom.

Return to the search page and enter BATCH # in the box near the bottom, if you want the whole list do not enter anything else. If you want to just see one particular family enter the surname in the appropriate box.

Clicking search will return a list of all of the individuals contained in that extraction. Each record usually contains more information such as parents name but does not show up unless you open each record.

Getting the full list via a GEDCOM

Those with a family tree program that accepts GEDCOM downloads can click on a box before each record and download any or all of the records. You can the import the records into a new file and produce reports that contain ALL of the information in ALL of the downloaded records.

In PAF from LDS here is how it is done. Go to Reports / Custom. Set up the fields that you want (name, c date, place, father , mother, etc). Select ALL individuals then use FILTER to eliminate records with no c date (there will be a lot of these due to the way the records are indexed but they will be duplicates of the mother and fathers name in most cases). Sort by date or whatever to suit.

Preview the list and change criteria until you are satisfied and then print to file or paper. You now have a compact list of all the named individuals in that PR from IGI.

Assembling and sorting lists from various web resources in an organized manner.

We all know that we can cut and paste records from the screen to a document but often they contain field names, links and other stuff that we really don’t want. Here is how to clean up and merge those records.

First make a habit of pasting to notepad (as opposed to Word or whatever), this drops any formatting and make it much easer to manipulate later.

Second group records in the same format together when pasting ( ie. Name, date place OR date, name, place)

You can do a find / copy / find next, directly from the web page and just copy those records that you need or copy the whole darn thing and edit it off line. I prefer the first but you do as you like!

Once you have a collection of similar listings, copy that group from notepad into Word or another word processing program and use the edit / find / replace to get rid of the unwanted stuff.

i.e Name, Joe Blow Place Timbuctoo, birth date 12 jan 1750

Find “Name” replace with “”, do the same with Place and Birth date and you get:-

, Joe Blow Timbuctoo, 12 jan 1750

This is a lot cleaner but still has a couple of problems particularly if you want to later put this into a database. In order to have a “clean” list each entry should be separated with a “,” and the first item on the list should not be preceded by anything. So go back to the original list and do this:-

Find “,name” replace with “”, find Place replace with “,”, find Birth date replace with “” , and you get:-

,Joe Blow, Timbuctoo, 12 jan 1750

With a little practice and examination of the original list you can quite quickly tidy up a long and junky list into a neat readable listing. There may be the odd line that you have to edit by hand to make it similar to the rest but its much easer that trying to retype all the info with all the possible errors that may creep in!

NOTE In the above “” means don’t enter anything! You can also replace “white space” i.e. text with a big gap, with a single space (look in the More / Special in Find / Replace)

Save it all, if you want to put it in a database also SAVE AS a TEXT file!

Importing to a Database / Spreadsheet

NOW to put all these into a data base, try this:- Open your usual spreadsheet program (the following is specific to XL but most other programs have similar capabilities)

Go to File / Import / Text find your file and import it, click the “,” (comma) as a delimiter and you should see your data split up into columns containing name, place ect. Finish the import and you should now have all the data in a spreadsheet. Use the automatic column width to see everything cleanly.

You can now sort, move columns around and easily manipulate the data to suit previously created lists and then copy and paste to one big list.

All this sound like a lot of work, but it is not hard once you get on to it and ensures that the data is not compromised by typos or other mistakes. You may also deal with lists from other programs like this (including the rtf files produced by the above PAF report) provided that you can save or convert them into a simple text (txt) file.

One final recommendation, SAVE your work at each stage (you can later go back and delete those files not needed) so that if you screw up you can go back and try again without having to start over from the very beginning.