June 27, On This Day in My Family Tree...

I know I have been remiss in posting so I've come up with another feature which will detail events from my family tree that occurred on the same day as the post, however many years ago. I got this idea when it dawned on me that on December 7th of this year, my 2nd great grandmother died exactly 100 years ago. I don't think there's enough events in my tree to have each one be a milestone anniversary, like precisely 100 years, but I thought it'd be interesting nonetheless.

If you're interested in doing something like this yourself, I used FTM 2012 to create a calendar, including everyone in my tree. Just go to the "publish" tab and under "other" there will be the option for a calendar. On the right, under the options, choose "All Individuals". Also be sure to click the first icon in the toolbar row, shown to the left. Here you can customize what gets included (shown below) but I was a little disappoint that I didn't get the option to include any fact like I can with other reports. Only BMD gets included, I guess because they think those are the common anniversaries that people celebrate or mark. It's a shame they couldn't think of any other use one might have for a calendar, like this one! I would have liked to include facts like military enlistment, baptism, burials, immigration, etc. I wish FTM would add a feature that would basically be like a timeline of all the events in my tree. It's worth noting there is a Timeline Report but it's under "Person Reports" and is therefore only a timeline for one person. I realize a timeline of every event from every individual in a tree would be a lot of data but what use is a genealogy management program if it can't process a lot of data, right?

But I digress. The options you do have are things like how many months to include, whether to list people's ages or how many years it's been since that event, whether to use married names for females, etc. These are all up to you. The important ones that you make sure are UNticked are "Include births and marriages only if still living" and "Exclude marriage anniversaries if relationship status is "deceased". If you leave these ticked, you'll only get results for people still living.

You may wind up with a calendar full of names you can't remember, which is why I'll be looking up each person and getting more details of the event - but the calendar provides a quick and easy reference for finding what happened "on this day in my family tree".

So, on this day in my family tree . . .

118 years ago in 1872, my 3rd great grandfather Wilson S. Ramsey married his third wife Laura S. Vincent in Columbiana County, Ohio. His first wife, Susan Frantz, was my 3rd great grandmother.

And . . .

53 years ago in 1960, my 2nd great grand aunt (the sister of my 2nd great grandfather) Mary Louise Pike died in Ohio. She had never married.