Lee, Thank you for outlining this very interesting idea. I will consider trying it in my own, smaller (17,000) project. Could I ask a very simplistic question about your final idea for finding these EOL persons? I thought I might start in my project by just going to a few of the main lines I know about and 'manually' tracing back to the end-of-line, starting from some recent individual. I just wanted to confirm that I'm not missing something obvious here -- is that equivalent to your procedure, at least in its end result? Of course your way is more systematic and would uncover lines which might not be so easy to think of right away. Thanks, John Cordes On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 12:35:23PM -0400, Lee Hoffman/KY via wrote: > Something I have done for years in my projects is to create > End-of-Line (EOL) persons. They help me quickly got to the oldest > ancestor in a line. Further, I make all the EOL persons to be > siblings under a single EOL. So I can go to the single EOL person > and quickly come forward to any one line and all I need remember is > the single EOL person's ID#. The arrangement is like this: > Single EOL Person (ID# 100) > EOL Brown (ID# 2500) > EOL Clay (ID# 7487) > EOL Hoffman (ID# 9942) > EOL Jones (ID# 2700) > EOL O'Rear (ID# 15602) > EOL Smith (ID# 5523) > EOL Wyatt (ID# 36582) > With over 56,000 persons in my main data set, I have some 400 > different EOL persons. An EOL person is one have no parents, but > begins a line of descendants. (I have many persons without parents > who are witnesses to events, spouses of descendants, lodgers in a > census household or otherwise are only connected for informational > purposes. I don;t consider these to be EOL persons). > > Over time, I have attempted to research the EOL persons under each > EOL line and try to trace where those might connect. For example, > under EOL Clay, at one time, I had four or five different Clay lines > that seemingly were unrelated. Concentrating on them, I was able to > find where those lines connected and I now have only one Clay line > that is under the EOL Clay person. On the other hand, my EOL Jones > line has some 70 EOL persons as "children" and I doubt that I can > connect them all together. I may get the number down by ten or so, > (if I'm lucky) but it will still have a lot of unconnected persons. > > Besides quickly finding any one EOL person, this helps organize my > research. Two reports are helpful. One is a List of People report > based in the Single EOL Person and the descendants for one or two > generations. The second report is Descendants Chart for the Single > EOL Person for 2 generations. This give me a quick overview of all > my EOL people. I will occasionally do a 3 generation version of this > (to screen) to get a greater view of some of the lines. > > After I have done quite of bit of research and data entry, I will > work with these reports to see if the new information can help tie > people together. Often I will find some people are duplicates who > can be merged and thus reduce the EOL lines or I can add more > information to one EOL person which will help in eventually > connecting that person with another EOL person. > > One way to help find the EOL persons is to set a Custom EOL Flag > based on a List of People report using a filter like: > Father ID# =Equals 0 AND > Mother ID# =Equals 0 END > I then went through that report and crossed off (reset the Flag) > those that were just Witnesses, etc. This then gave me a few hundred > persons who were candidates for creating EOL Persons. > > This process may not work for everyone, but has helped me - > > Lee

At 7/23/2015 15:13, you wrote: > Could I ask a very simplistic question about your final >idea for finding these EOL persons? > > I thought I might start in my project by just going to a >few of the main lines I know about and 'manually' tracing >back to the end-of-line, starting from some recent individual. > > I just wanted to confirm that I'm not missing something >obvious here -- is that equivalent to your procedure, at >least in its end result? Of course your way is more >systematic and would uncover lines which might not be so >easy to think of right away. Any way that works for you would be suitable. The larger the data set, the more likely the result of just looking for those without parents will be a very large group as many will be just Witnesses. So the final list will likely be persons selected by just browsing through the data set. Lee Hoffman/KY