There are several programs I use regularly to check my genealogy database for any inconsistencies. RootsMagic is one of those.
I had come to use RootsMagic 3 because it performs many basic checks fast. Legacy 7 may have the most extensive consistency checks, but both the data import and the problem search take hours, and that makes it impractical to use it very often.
I do use more programs, but I use these two most often; RootsMagic for fast basic checks, Legacy for slow extensive checks.
I encountered problems with the RootsMagic 4 preview and beta. One of these was that the consistency check had become unusable, as it reported many false positives: problems that are not problems at all. There had always been some logic errors in RootsMagic 3 that resulted in false positives, but the RootsMagic 4 Beta generated many, many more because its date arithmetic was defective.
I exchanged quite some emails about this with Bruce Buzbee, including examples
of cases were things continued to go wrong after initial fixes.
By the time RootsMagic 4 was released, the date arithmetic worked as it should and the RootsMagic Problem Search was back to the quality
level of RootsMagic 3.
The RootsMagic 4 consistency checks look and feel like those of RootsMagic 3. The menu item is the same and the options dialog box is the same.
Your first impression is likely to be that everything is the same, but there are differences. The dialog box that presents the results is a bit different, but the first thing you are a likely to notice if you have a large database, is that RootsMagic 4 is slower than RootsMagic 3.
I loaded the same database into both, selected the same options in both and then let them both run their checks while the other program was idling. RootsMagic 3 needed 49s, RootsMagic 4 need 1m39s (99s), That’s more than double the time.
I had initially left an option checked for RootsMagic 4 that I had unchecked in
RootsMagic 3 (Birth before parent’s marriage
is just too common to be
a very useful check), so I had to time it again, but the extra option did not make a
noticeable difference in run time.
Somehow, RootsMagic 4’s consistency check is only half as fast as RootsMagic
3’s consistency check. I am guessing this is because RootsMagic 4 allows more flexible dates than RootsMagic 3. RootsMagic 3 allows approximated dates
(ABT) and dates limits (BEF, AFT), RootsMagic 4 additionally allows approximated
limits (BEF ABT, AFT ABT).
It is both reassuring and disappointing to note that the results which RootsMagic 3 and RootsMagic 4 present are exactly the same. It is reassuring to see that the date arithmetic defects that were present during the preview have been fixed in the release and that RootsMagic 4 is now just as good as RootsMagic 3. It is disappointing that RootsMagic 4 isn’t better than RootsMagic3.
There are some long-standing logic flaws in RootsMagic 3 that RootsMagic 4
does not fix. I had hoped for improvement, but RootsMagic 4 comparison logic is
no better than that of RootsMagic. It still compares the age children to their
adoptive parents and guardians as if these are the biological parents.
So, anytime a man remarries with a relative young woman, RootsMagic complains
that the mother was young when the children (from the previous partnership) were
born.
Another problem that remains is that RootsMagic still offers an option to check for birth of children after their father’s death, but that is not want you want. You want a check for birth more than nine months after the father’s death.
I currently have dozens of children born after their father’s death in my database. In most cases, the births are perfectly possible and the data is fine. There probably are a few impossible cases due to typos, but these are buried in the flood of false positives.
RootsMagic 3 places the buttons along the side of the results, RootsMagic 4
has the buttons along the top. RootsMagic 3 has both an Edit Person…
and an Edit
Family…
button, RootsMagic 4 has only the Edit Person
button (and yes, it is
currently lacking the ellipsis it should have).
You might think that RootsMagic 4 has less functionality, but the simple fact is that the Person dialog it brings up links to the rest of the family. Because RootsMagic 4 offers more data in single a dialog box and easy navigation to related persons, you do not need to chose between two dialog boxes anymore. That is an improvement.
The RootsMagic 4 dialog box offers more information, but I like the overall design of RootsMagic 3 Person dialog better; it has tabs for easy access to Notes, Sources, Multimedia etcetera, whereas the RootsMagic 4 dialog wants you to click a button for a pop-up window and then click another button to close it again. That is not an improvement.
A little thing worth mentioning is that the problem search results are persistent. When you bring up a Person dialog box to review and perhaps edit the data, the search results are still there, so you can immediately choose another person to edit. Some other applications would have you do another problem search.
For example, PAF will generate a report of possible problems, and you can choose to preview the report instead of print it, but you will have to leave that preview to review and edit an record, and then create a new report preview.
The Problem Search results dialog box lets you mark an issue as Not a
Problem
. When you do so, it immediately disappears from the dialog.
I decided to mark all issues as Not a
Problem
and run the Problem Search again. When you do so (with the same
option settings), in either RootsMagic 3 or RootsMagic 4, you end up with a
empty results screen.
That is fairly logical, except for one thing; the dialog offers no way to see what records have been excluded from the check. RootsMagic does let you view and edit the Not a Problem List, just not from the Problem Search results dialog box. I think it would be handy to have it right there, on a separate tab, but it is only available as a separate dialog box and you cannot have both open at the same time.
The RootsMagic 4 consistency checks are just the same as the RootsMagic 3 consistency checks. Even the options dialog box is the same, and both versions produce the same results.
Somehow RootsMagic 4 takes twice as long to do so. RootsMagic 4 is still pretty fast, but the slowdown is a surprising. Throughout the RootsMagic 4 Preview and Beta, Bruce Buzbee made it very clear that having roughly the same or better performance than RootsMagic 3 was a design goal for RootsMagic 4, and the RootsMagic 4 consistency checks do not meet that goal. I do consider it fast enough though.
I like some dialog changes and do not like others.
I am disappointed that RootsMagic 4 still contains the same logic errors as
RootsMagic 3; it still compares adoptive parents and guardians as if they are
biological parents and still does not treat birth after father’s death as it
should. Legacy isn’t any smarter about these things, but I’d love to see
both vendors improve their products and start doing these comparisons correctly.
RootsMagic 3 performs the consistency check twice as fast as RootsMagic 4 and produces exactly the same results, yet that does not imply that anyone with a large database looking for a fast consistency check to use in combination with their current program should choose RootsMagic 3 over its successor. RootsMagic 4 is still the winner; it makes up for the slowdown by importing data much faster, and additionally includes a fast geo-coding option that leaves you with a list of the place names it could not match, another good check to have around.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.