Monday, December 4, 2017

Adoptions and Roots Magic Genealogy Reports


An orphan named Jacob sent me into the weeds this weekend while accepting a challenge on genealogy errors. Read a bit of Jacob's story as told to me by his son and think about where you would place him in the family tree.

My father was born about 1887 or 1888. He was orphaned at a very early age and existed as a waif on the streets of Dallas, Texas. Sometime in the early 1890's a rancher by the name of Lucas took him off the streets back to his ranch to raise.  It would have been Andrew Jackson Lucas ... Whether he was officially adopted or just brought in as a foster child I don't know. My father didn't know his name so he took the name Theodore Lucas.

He lived with the Lucases until their daughter [Nora] married Frank Allee [in 1896] and he then went to live at the Allee place. He stayed with them until in his mid to late teens, when he left... He also said he was called Jakey. At one time while he was living with the Allees he considered changing his name to Jake Allee.
- Fayette B. Lucas, 2000

Was Jacob a foster child of Andrew Jackson Lucas and Mary Elizabeth Houston or was he a foster child of Nora Bell Lucas and Abraham Frank Allee? There is no right answer. The choice I made was flagged as an error in Roots Magic when I took Randy Seaver's challenge for Saturday night genealogy fun: checking for errors by running a Genealogy Database Problem Report.

To respond to Randy's challenge, I imported my Family Tree Maker database into Roots Magic, as I highly value the Roots Magic reporting capabilities. I started with the same values he used, but changed them a bit as I had a number of girls who married as early as 13. Jacob was flagged as being born when his mother (Nora) was 12 and his father (Frank) was 14. I understand that this could be an error, even though he was a foster child. The idea is to look at the dates to be sure there isn't a typo or research error.




After marking some items as not an error, including Jacob's birth, there were 18 errors remaining to be reviewed for 6,299 people and 10,688 events. That's an error rate of 0.29% on people and 0.17% on events.

However, checking on Jacob's error did show me a gap in Roots Magic. In the two versions of Family Tree Maker that I use, there are options to create a report of people who are not biological children of one or both parents. Roots Magic does not seem to have any way to create such a report. I also could not find a way to make these relationship indicators print on a family group sheet in Roots Magic, while they can be selected in FTM. I spent hours looking for how to report on relationships, as my intent is to entirely switch to Roots Magic and away from the now-defunct FTM.

That missing information is a problem, as adoptions are scattered throughout my tree and step-parents abound. With the new focus on DNA, it's an important piece of information. The primary way to see the relationship is on the specific family page. The relationship for Jacob shows as foster, while the other children have a relationship of birth, meaning biological children.




When the child has a different relationship with each of the two parents, there are two words in the relationship column, one for father and one for mother.




The reporting features of Roots Magic still make it my favorite reporting program. There is a new version in the works and I have high hopes it will include options to include relationships on reports and forms.

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