Dear Listers,   I am one of the fortunate ones who has the 1880 US Census at our FHC (I was at NGS and was able to buy one of the copies :-)   Now I would like to make a sort so that I can know all the people in my database who were living in US in 1880.   I tried all kinds of sorts but none seemed to work.   Can I get some suggestions please on how to create a custom report for this purpose? Here's what I tried: 1) created custom report with name, surname; birth place, birth date; named it 1880 US Census--that worked fine 2)  chose 'select people' instead of all of database 3)  chose Find and tried to create criteria in search criteria screen; this is where things did not work 4)  chose birth place - does not contain - England (since none of my English ancestors were here in 1880) this did not work.  People with England in their birthplace were marked 5) I tried the same with Scotland; same problem.  Some of my Scottish relatives were chosen, others not eventhough the word Scotland was in their birth place 6) I tried clearing criteria, the criteria would disappear until I exited and then it all came back;  I tried clearing and choosing new criteria such as birth date - is before - 1880.  Even people born in 1927 were marked! And my old criteria remained in the other criteria positions but without any parameters; I could not totally clear my criteria 7)  I tried eliminating the report by going to my reports file and deleting 1880 US Census but when I created a new 1880 US Census custom report, the criteria had reappeared 8) when I typed in birth place does not contain Scotland  Or birthplace does not contain England Or birthplace does not contain Sweden, the criteria 'does not contain' would disappear from the 2nd and 3rd choices although the birth place and words England and Sweden remained. 9) I finally gave up and decided to rejoin this list. I love the filtering system but have always been very frustrated by it!  I even looked in my book on FO, but the example is so ultra simple, it does not address my problems. So, 1) should I uninstall FO and reinstall? 2  Are my problems similar to ones other's have been experiencing? 3) How do I create a custom report that I can take to my FHC to search for my ancestors in the 1880 census? Thanks, Margie in Washington State

Beldin4@aol.com wrote: >3)  chose Find and tried to create criteria in search criteria screen; this >is where things did not work > >4)  chose birth place - does not contain - England (since none of my English >ancestors were here in 1880) this did not work.  People with England in their >birthplace were marked =================== That is strange indeed, for the search in FO works quite well and normally doesn't act that way at all. Something is not working properly for you. I would back up the database and then try packing the database. If that doesn't help, try transferring the whole database to a new database by either drag & drop or via gedcom file export/import. If that doesn't help then I would reinstall FO from the original install CD right over the existing program. This will not bother your databases at all, but back all of them up first. Always be safe! ================== > >6) I tried clearing criteria, the criteria would disappear until I exited and >then it all came back;  ================== That is normal - - don't worry about that. Search criteria remains there until you change it to something else and actually use the new. That is so you can manually find the next instance of a search if you want to. ================== >8) when I typed in birth place does not contain Scotland  Or birthplace does >not contain England Or birthplace does not contain Sweden, the criteria 'does >not contain' would disappear from the 2nd and 3rd choices although the birth >place and words England and Sweden remained. ================== Again, this is not normal and your program needs to be repaired to fix whatever is wrong (see above). But you probably wouldn't want to use the above criteria anyway, for it will mark Scotland because it does not contain England and it will mark England because it does not contain Scotland, etc. (If it were working properly, that is) In short, it would mark everyone in the database. You would want to use AND's instead of OR's above. When you get your program working properly again, try using the individual list from the lists tab under reports. It will probably give you the list you want much easier than constructing a custom report. Wayne League