Legacy 7: How to find events missing a specific source citation

[Guest]

I wish to create a to-do list of all individuals in my database (probably) born in a particular year whose birth has not yet been documented by a birth certificate. I can see how to get a list of births that have no source citation, but in most cases I already have the date of birth documented from a census, so there is a source citation present, just not the best one. In any event there are about 55,000 individuals in my database and any poorly qualified a search is going to return thousands of entries.

I looked at "detailed search", but it does not provide the ability to search based upon source citations, presumably because the designer felt that the "missing sources" report would be used for that.

In the old version of FTM that I was using (until my database exceeded its capacity) you directly massaged the list of matches. I would first ask for everyone born in a particular year, and then exclude everyone in that list that already had a citation to a birth certificate. Because of this design the search took a relatively long time to complete, but I could get the data.

[Lynda]

Yeah, Legacy does not search well for something that is not there.

But, depending on how you have your sources defined, you could try something like the following: view master lists-sources, select the source you have defined for birth certificates, select show list, tag everyone in the list on a particular tag #; exit from there, then search for everyone born in the year you are interested in and add second condition where the tag specified above is equal to untagged.

Might have to play around with it.

Lynda

[jcobban]

... depending on how you have your sources defined, you could try something like the following: view master lists-sources, select the source you have defined for birth certificates, select show list, tag everyone in the list on a particular tag #; exit from there, then search for everyone born in the year you are interested in and add second condition where the tag specified above is equal to untagged.

Thank you, that does the trick.

[Lynda]

You are welcome.