Comments on: Family Tree Maker: Custom Facts

By: Lynn

Lynn — Sun, 16 May 2010 17:27:43 +0000

Tana,

Was interested to know when you plan to host the rescheduled Family Tree Maker Webinar.

Per your prior posting “This webinar has been rescheduled for May 19th. .. And don’t forget to check back in coming weeks for more details about the May webinar.”

Given May 19th is a couple days away and you have not posted “more details,” I am assuming the webinar will not be on May 19th. An update would be nice.

I look forward to learning some new tips/tricks during the webinar as well as potentially some further insights about the MAC version of FTM that will be released later this year.

By: Tana L. Pedersen

Tana L. Pedersen — Fri, 07 May 2010 16:03:52 +0000

Thanks for all your suggestions.

# 4
Harold, custom facts are included in your trees that you upload to Ancestry. As for Paf, I don’t know but I’ll do some investigating.

# 6
Larry, I definitely agree with you and I’d love to have this functionality too. But you’re right, you can’t modify the historical facts currently.

#7
Tyler, I think your idea for a true/false fact is great. Right now I write No Children, etc. in the Description field but it would be much simpler to click yes or no.

By: Tyler Rasmussen

Tyler Rasmussen — Thu, 06 May 2010 05:29:57 +0000

I tend to put the cemetery fact in the details field of the burial fact.

What I wish is that things like “No Children” could be a true/false fact rather than a date/place/description fact. I would love to be able to check “No Children” or “Never Married/Partnered” and that would disable the ability to add a spouse or children. Or “Number of Children” would limit how many could be entered. These seem like simple things that the program could constrain so as to not accidentally change information or be searching for more information when at some time you knew what you had was complete – or at least to give you a warning if you try to change something.

As for Age at Death or Died as an Infant – you would think FTM could create automatic facts for that. FTM already automatically displays age at death on the right column of the people view. But at the moment you cannot access it in a report outside of the timeline – but making a custom fact seems like an excess of effort when you have a 500+ person tree.

Still, I do like custom facts. I use it particularly for random things like memberships in clubs/organizations/greek-letter groups/etc.

By: Larry Holman

Larry Holman — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:43:53 +0000

I have recently submitted a question to FTM support on how can I customize (add/delete) the default historical facts embeded in the program that can only be selected in the Timeline Reports of the Personal reports mode in under Publish menu. I am interested in World events during the time period of an ancestor but I might like delete irrelevant one to me and I would like to add historical facts that occurred in the State, county or city where my ancestor lived. I haven’t received an answer back yet but hope they can show a way to do this or consider modifying the program to add this feature.

By: David Brener

David Brener — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:38:31 +0000

Facts are great, both custom and program supplied. However there is a big problem with them when you want to print the “simple register report”. With older versions, such as 2005, you can select to include all facts and all facts, with data, printed in tabular form. However, in 2010 version, if you select to include private facts, every private fact will print, even if no data. To avoid that, you have to select which private facts to include each and every time you want to print the report. In other reports, only the facts with data are printed, if you select to include private facts, but it is in a paragraph format and not in tabular form. If anyone out there has solution or if I am wrong, please respond or email me at BRENERDA@AOL.COM. Thank you.

By: Harold Hails

Harold Hails — Tue, 04 May 2010 15:38:24 +0000

Will these custom facts be recognized in the web based family tree, or by PAF?

By: James

James — Mon, 03 May 2010 22:53:23 +0000

When running my reports, I deselect “Include only preferred facts” so all facts of the same type show up for an individual.

Regards,

By: Nancy Nebiker

Nancy Nebiker — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:42:00 +0000

When you send out a report of the family, only one residence will show up–Preferred
So I add:
(Residence A)
(Residence B)
Same for Occupation
(Occupation A)
(Occupation B)
No everything will be on the preferred list.

By: Ann Hill

Ann Hill — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:25:46 +0000

Tana,
What a great idea! I’m using ‘Cemetery’ and I can see great potential for several of your suggestions. Thank you for sharing.
Ann