Software of the Month Club 1996 May

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CHAPTER 11 LISTS OF SIMILAR PERSONS, FAMILIES AND NOTES OR SEARCHING YOUR FOLDER FOR SPECIFIC INFORMATION PART A: AN INTRODUCTION WITH BASIC EXAMPLES... AN INTRODUCTION... What is GIM LISTS? Simply put, GIM LISTS provides you with a way to search through your folder for a list of people, families, or notes which meet a set of criteria, such as couples with a marriage date but no marriage place, or people who died between the ages of, say, 15 and 18. Why use GIM LISTS? GIM LISTS is a powerful tool for finding possible errors in your folder. For example, you can use it to search for persons who, according to the data in your folder, "died" before they were born. GIM LISTS is a powerful tool for finding those notes that you remember writing, but you may not remember where you put them. GIM LISTS can search through all the notes in your folder for the notes you want to find. GIM LISTS is a powerful tool for finding those ancestors whose LDS temple ordinances are not yet complete. For those researchers with an interest in LDS temple work, GIM LISTS can spotlight those ancestors who need their temple work done. GIM LISTS is a powerful tool for finding curiosities about your data, such as the oldest man and woman in your folder, or the youngest mother, or the longest marriage, or the number of women named Mary. GIM LISTS is also able to create lists of place names that are used in your folder, sorted in six different styles and formats. By looking over these place lists, you can learn a lot about any misspellings that appear in your folder, and whether any towns are in the wrong counties, or in no county at all. A BASIC EXAMPLE... The best way to show what GIM LISTS is all about is to start with a straightforward example. Let's suppose you want to make a list of all the German women in your folder. What exactly is a list? Simply put, a "list" is a collection of things -- either people, families, notes, or places -- that all share something in common. Every list has a name (such as "Farmers" or "Single Parents"), and every list is sorted in some order (such as alphabetically by surname). GIM LISTS already knows about three lists, called "All Persons", "All Families", and "All Notes". You don't have to do anything to create these; they always exist, and cannot be destroyed. Any time you want to create a new list, you have to build it from an existing list. For example, you can use the list called "All Persons" to build a list called "Germans". Also for example, you can use this new list ("Germans") to create a third list called "German Women". To make a new list, you need to tell GIM LISTS three or four things: 1. What you want to call the new list (for example, "German Women"). 2. What existing list you want to use to build the new list (such as "All Persons"). 3. Which members of the existing list ("All Persons") you want to include in the new list ("German Women") -- in this example, you want to include all the females who have the word "Germany" in any of their place names. 4. You may also want to tell GIM LISTS how to sort the list as it creates it. You can leave out this piece of information; if you do, GIM LISTS will choose its own criterion for sorting the list. You give GIM LISTS this information with four commands. GIM LISTS has about two dozen commands, each of which will be summarized in the next section ("A Glossary of GIM LISTS Commands with Examples"). For now, we are concerned with only five of them. (MAKE) 1. What to call the new list The first command to know about is the MAKE command. This command is used to tell GIM LISTS what you want to call the new list. To use it, type "MAKE German Women" (without quotation marks) at the GIM LISTS prompt, and press the enter key. (The GIM LISTS prompt initially reads "GIM Lists > ", but you can change it with the PROMPT command.) (FROM) 2. What to use to build the new list The second command to know about is the FROM command. This command is used to tell GIM LISTS what existing list to use to build the new list from. To use it, type "FROM All Persons" (without quotation marks) at the GIM LISTS prompt, and press the enter key. (WHERE) 3. Which members to select The third command to know about is the WHERE command. This command is used to tell GIM LISTS which members of the existing list you want to include in the new list. To use it, type the next line at the GIM LISTS prompt and press the enter key: WHERE any place contains "Germany" and gender is "F" (In this case, the quotation marks are essential.) (ORDER) 4. How to sort the new list The fourth command to know about is the ORDER command. We won't use this for the moment, just to keep the example simple, but if you were to use it, you would type (for example) "ORDER surname" and press return. This would cause the new list to be sorted by last name. Now, look at what you've just typed: MAKE German Women FROM All Persons WHERE any place contains "Germany" and gender is "F" Those three lines together comprise a single thought, and taken together, they completely tell GIM LISTS what it is you want to find out. (GO) All you need to do now is tell GIM LISTS that you are ready for it to go to work. To do so, type the word "GO" at the GIM LISTS prompt, and watch it go. When it's complete, you can use the DISPLAY command to display the members of the list. The DISPLAY command will be discussed in detail below, in the section entitled "How to Get the Most Out of the DISPLAY Command". For now, just type "DISPLAY" (without quotation marks) to see a list of the German Women in your folder. ANOTHER BASIC EXAMPLE... You should read the previous basic example and make sure you understand it. Practice it, and practice some variations, and then read this section. For this example, let's make a list of direct ancestors who were married exactly twice. To start with, let's make a list of direct ancestors. After we've done that, we'll use that list to build another list of people who married exactly twice. After reading the first example, the following GIM LISTS commands should be more or less familiar: MAKE Direct Ancestors FROM All Persons WHERE gin NE 0 The only surprise here is the new WHERE command, which needs some explanation. In a roundabout way, it tells GIM LISTS to select only direct ancestors from the list of All Persons. (GIN) What is a GIN? Every person in your folder has a GIN number. The GIN numbers of direct ancestors are positive numbers, and the GIN numbers for all the rest are zero. The WHERE command above selects only those GIN numbers which are not equal to zero, which is another way of telling GIM LISTS to only pick direct ancestors out of the list of All Persons. For more information about what GIN numbers are, see the glossary in Appendix B of this documentation. For more information about how to set GIN numbers, and what to do if your direct ancestors don't have GIN numbers, see chapter 15 of this documentation, under the Reset-GIN function of the Utilities Area. What does "NE" mean? The word "NE" is called an operator, whereas "gin" and "0" are operands -- things that the operator operates on. GIM LISTS provides scores of operators. Some operators represent "is not equal to"; others represent "is less than"; others represent dates that are on or before other dates -- such as a birth date before 1700. In the first example above, we saw two operators. One was the word "contains", and was used to find any place that contains the word "Germany". The other was the word "is", which is used to find a value that is the same as another value. These and other operators will be discussed in more detail below, in the section entitled "Operators Used in WHERE Commands". GIM LISTS provides a number of synonyms for each operator. Instead of using "NE" to mean "is not equal to", we could have used any of the following: <> != isn't is not equal to doesn't equal ... and many others. "<>" has meaning for Pascal and BASIC programmers; "!=" has meaning for C programmers; and "NE" has meaning for FORTRAN programmers. These provide a shorthand way of expressing the thought, but it would have been just as effective to use this... WHERE gin doesn't equal 0 ... in place of the WHERE command that we used. Now that we've explained the WHERE command we used above, it should be clear that we're telling GIM LISTS to select direct ancestors from the list of All Persons, and to put those selections into a new list called "Direct Ancestors". To have this command take effect, we type "GO" and press the enter key like we did before. When GIM LISTS is finished, the new list is available for our use, and we can use it to create a second new list, which we will call "Double Marriages". By now you should have guessed how the command to do so will begin: MAKE Double Marriages FROM Direct Ancestors WHERE spouses = 2 Now again, we have a new WHERE command, and we'll explain it briefly: What is "spouses"? "Spouses" is another operand, like "gender" and "gin". It means "the number of times a person married", and is a number, just like the GIN number. All of the avail- able operands will be discussed below, in the section entitled "Operands Used in WHERE Commands". What is "="? Like "NE", "=" is an operator, and tests two numbers for equality. In this case, it is testing whether "spouses" (the number of times a person married) is equal to 2. Like "NE", there are a number of synonyms available for "=", including: == eq equals is equal to ... and many others. As you can see, once we type "GO" and press return, GIM LISTS will select only those members of the "Direct Ancestors" list who have exactly two spouses. Everyone who shows up in this new list will be both a direct ancestor AND will have two spouses. Now, having said that, we can create this new list in one step instead of two by combining both WHERE commands into a single command. Study the following set of commands to see how this is done. MAKE Direct Ancestors with Two Spouses FROM All Persons WHERE gin ne 0 and spouses eq 2 GO For more information on the use of "AND" and "OR" in WHERE commands, see the section below, entitled "Conjunctions Used in WHERE Commands".