Research Forum

Firstly I discovered that hitting the Print Screen button on the laptop does not do as it did before. Windows 11 has linked it to the Snipping Tool where you can do (from left to right) rectangular selection, freehand selection, window, or full-screen capture. So using the first one I can just copy the stuff out of documents that I am looking at and hey presto copy them into wherever I want. (I normally save the images but they are saved automatically anyway in your Pictures/Screenshots folder.

Secondly I found a different way to use Family Tree Maker. I store in here any research for people with connected names even if they may not have a link to my family – sometimes you cannot see the wood for the trees (pardon the pun). I have tended to use lower case for the surnames and/or forenames which sort of works but then people of the same name are separate in the index and sometimes you miss possible links. The Colour Coding that was introduced recently certainly does help a lot and  have used extensively but it is not always permanent.

So what I have done is used the title field. I have not got many of the gentry in my tree so there are not many Lords, Ladies, Sirs or Dames to worry about.

I have put an asterisk in the Title field on anybody not connected to the family directly.

Here below is a selection of John McLEANs (from Antrim mostly)

The ones I know are mine are in Red.

Press the 1^st button in the top right corner and “Use titles if available”

Then this is what I get

So I can now concentrate on who I want and all the others have gone elsewhere in the index. But I can then easily return to compare individuals.

I suppose you could group all sorts of people together using different characters/prefixes  but I have found that it does make a big difference for what I am trying to do.

Thanks for listening

Rob

Gosh!  Thanks for these hints, Rob - hope others find them useful, too

Jenny