Create a list of overseas ancestors
shows you which search tools will help you…
There may come a point in your research where you need to find a piece of information from your tree, but the search tools aren’t up to the task. That’s what reader Malcolm Smith discovered when he attempted to produce a list of all relatives and ancestors based outside the UK. Neither tool he uses for his tree – Ancestry and Family Tree Maker (FTM) – lets you do this.
Set the right ‘conditions’ in Legacy
There are more sophisticated tools to help you, such as the two we’ll recommend here. The first, completely free, is the Standard version of Legacy from www. legacyfamilytree.com. Malcolm can transfer his tree from FTM to Legacy using the universal GEDCOM format (see
Issue 561 for instructions – you’ll find it on our 2020
Back Issue CD: www.snipca. com/37026).
Once transferred, switch to Legacy’s Search tab at the top, then click the Find button. Select the Detailed tab to reveal tools that let you search for up to three keywords at a time. Set the first (‘Primary’) condition to: ‘Individual, Birth Place, Contains’, and then type Australia
(or whichever country you’re looking for). Set the second condition to ‘Individual, Event-place, Contains’ (again with Australia), and the third to Individual, Death Place, and Contains (Australia). The screenshot below shows these selections.
Next, click ‘Create List’ and a list of all people who were born, died, or spent time in Australia will appear in the list. You can then repeat the search for other countries by clicking the Search button and selecting ‘Find…’ from the pop-up menu. Change the country name, and make sure you select ‘Add results to existing List’ before clicking
Create List again. This will add matching individuals from your second country to the existing list. Repeat for each country you want to add.
It’s not a perfect list. Anyone who spent time in the countries will appear, even those who subsequently returned to Britain, but it’s still a handy summary.
Use Heredis’s Smart Search
If you’re willing to pay, then Heredis (around £28, www.heredis.com/en) offers a better solution. After importing your file into the program, open the Find menu and choose ‘Smart Search…’. You’ll see a search panel with five dropdown menus and one search field to fill. Set the dropdown menus to Facts, Any Fact, Place, ‘One of the fields above’, and Contains respectively, then type the name of your first country into the search box next to these.
Next, click ‘+’ (the plus symbol) to the right of the search box and type the name of the second country you’re looking for (‘Australia’ in the screenshot above). Add as many new countries as you need. Next, select ‘One of the criteria’, then click Search to reveal the results. Beneath the results you’ll see buttons letting you process this list further – click Edit to generate a custom report or click the floppy-disk icon above the search criteria to save the results.