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Insider's Guide to GenerationsInsider's Guide to Generations


Searching for Items with Generations Grande Suite
By Michael A. Hobart

This article originally appeared in Everton's Genealogical Helper.

Generations Grande Suite has good search capabilities built into it. There are a number of preset search conditions that are included and readily available from the menus (Figure 1).

Figure 1
Figure 1

A nice feature of the program is that it allows you to create your own conditions and save them as additional "Presets" that will show up on this menu.

The main menu item for carrying out searches is the "Find Anything" screen. (Figure 2)

Figure 2
Figure 2

As one can see, the searches may be carried out for individuals or for couples. The distinction is that there are certain types of data — marriage dates and locations, for example, that exist only for couples.

There are three fields involved in each search item:

  1. The field name on the left, where all event fields, facts, flags, and such are available from a pop-up menu.
  2. The relation field in the middle (pop-up menu shown).
  3. The value field on the right, where the particular value is entered. This is also left blank in certain cases. For certain types of data, such as whether or not a family card is marked, the value isn't relevant so it's not shown.

The types of relations available are: "Is," "Is Not," "Before," "After," "Contains," "Does Not Contain," and "Starts With." These options give you great flexibility in your searches. The example shown in Figure 2 is the find condition for the "Changed This Week" preset from the menu shown in Figure 1.

Searches may consist of multiple conditions, joined by the "AND" box on the left of the Find Anything screen. As one adds more conditions, additional "AND" boxes appear. (Figure 3)

Figure 3
Figure 3

This example represents a search for any of my ancestors with the name Jecklin, or similar surnames (as found by the soundex value of J245) which I have added to the database or modified in any way in the last week.

But there is one major limitation to the search capability. The only relationship between multiple search conditions is "AND." The "OR" condition is not available. The answer to this is to carry out a search where you need to use the "OR" condition in multiple steps and mark cards to save your intermediate results.

A feature which makes this practical is the ability to save "marked sets" of cards. Before you carry out the "Find Anything" search you should always check to see if you have any cards already marked in the database.

If there are marked cards and you wish to save them for future reuse, you just go to the "Mark Groups" item at the bottom of the Find menu in Figure 1. Use the "Save Marked Set" option, giving it a descriptive name, and note that it is often useful to include a date in the name (see below). Then you can safely clear the marked cards in the database.

A Real Life Example
Now I'll give you an example of a complex search where we have to use an "OR" condition. I have been working on various Swiss lines from a wide range of sources and have accumulated bits and pieces of evidence from all over the map. Often it is hard to decide if the Andreas Jecklin you see in a census, born in 1809, is the same as the one you see getting married in 1836. Or, for example, which of the two people of that name getting christened during 1809 in the church books is the one you have been studying, and so forth.

So I have a lot of people with "some" data who are nonetheless not linked together. I want to collect these people, see how bad the problem is, and then devote my efforts to getting these unlinked people put together (or at least minimize the number of unlinked people).

One criteria for the search will be to find people with no parents listed (one of the presets). Another will be to pick up the various Jecklins; but the Swiss records, like most others, show a variety of ways to spell the name: Jecklin, Jacklin, Jeclin, Jeklin, etc. The obvious solution here is to use the soundex search (J245 as mentioned above). One can readily perform such a search with the two conditions being (1) no parents, "AND" (2) soundex equals J245.

The need for the "OR" search arises since I am going to be working in these Swiss records and I want to make the best use of my time. So I also want to do a similar search for some of the other surnames I am working on in this area.

The conditions are similar but the names are Schalleben (soundex = S615) and Tarnutzer (soundex = T653). The Tarnutzer surname is where things get complicated. Tarnutzer is also seen in Swiss records as Tarnuzzer (soundex = T652), and furthermore it is found with a "D" substituting for the initial "T" (soundex = D653 and D652, respectively). If you wonder about these, take a look again at the soundex coding rules; they group "D" and "T" together; and that proves true in both the Swiss and the U.S. records.

So, since I want to put together a list of unlinked people with these three surnames, what I have is:

[No parents]
AND
[(soundex equals J245) OR (soundex equals S615) OR (soundex equals T653) OR (soundex equals T652) OR (soundex equals D653) OR (soundex equals D652)]

As I've said, there isn't a boolean OR command between conditions in the program, nor can you search for multiple soundex values in one pass.

So, what you have to do is perform the search in multiple steps — in this case six searches:

[No parents]
AND
[soundex equals NNN]
where the successive NNN values are J245, S615, T653, T652, D653, and D652

After each search, mark the results of the search, but do not clear the existing marked cards in the family file!

What I chose to do in this example was to export a data file of the marked cards consisting of ID number, given name, surname, birth data, death date, and first spouse. I then opened that file in Excel, did some sorting, and printed out a copy of the list.

I then had it in hand while I was working with the microfilms. When I found people and linked them, I crossed them off my list; conflicts could be noted; and I could just jump to the ID number shown rather than having to recall the "Previous List" under "Find Anything" (see Figure 2).

At the end of this process, you can save the sum of these multiple searches as another marked set if you wish. You can also clear the results of the search and restore any previously saved marked sets.

One word of caution regarding marked sets, especially if they have been saved for some length of time: As one works in a data set, people may be deleted and the program will later reuse that internal ID number for another person. So a marked set which contains that internal ID number will mark a person differently from what was originally intended.

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