RootsMagic Webinars and Spring Break

Yesterday marked the end of spring break here in Fort Wayne. I didn't get a chance to go on my research trip due to the weather, but will try again in May. I made 4 trips to ACPL and was even able to do some research on my own family (instead of just my husband's lines).

While entering data into my genealogy database, I watched all the archived RootsMagic webinars. I have been using RootsMagic for 2 years now. There are many things I love about the software, but there were many things that I wished that it could do. Apparently, it does a lot of the things I thought that it didn't.

Here are just a few of the things that I learned:

• There's a calculator built into the date field that can be used to find birth dates when tombstones only contain death date and age at death. No more having to open up a website and then copying the date over to my database.
• You can print reports of where all your sources are used. This is going to really help me clean up some of the old sources that I still have in my database when I redid. I don't think they are still being used as citations, but I want to make sure before I delete them.
• There is a "missing information" report that will print out a list of names and a blank for whatever field you are looking into filling.
• You can make custom reports. There is a whole webinar on something I didn't even know I could do.

If you are using RootsMagic software, make some time and watch their archived webinars. You will be amazed by what hidden gems you find available to you. I recommend downloading the videos instead of streaming them. I had some problems with the streaming and you will want to go back and watch some parts over again anyway.

Disclosure: RootsMagic did not pay me for this review. They did send me the Getting the Most Out of RootsMagic book for Christmas 2009 though. (Or Santa uses a RootsMagic email address.)