AQ Will Do

State of Confusion

Dale ♦ 2023/11/12 ♦ 3 Comments

Updated 12 Nov 2023 – AQ Version 16.0.12 – 10/12/2023

In the Yahoo Group [AncestralQuest] an interesting question was asked this morning.

This newsgroup is now accessed with the URL: https://groups.io/g/AncestralQuest

Its LDS related URL is: https://groups/g/AQ-FS

I’m attempting to identify all of my ancestors who have been born, lived, married or died in a particular state.  How do I generate such a list?

There are two general approaches to this problem.
1. Use the Contains operator.
2. Query the State position within the place name.

Each of these methods can be problematic, but for different reasons. Let’s start by deciding which of the two methods we will use, and why we will use it.

My years as a volunteer at the Ogden FamilySearch Library have convinced me that most people either are not aware of the advice Gaylon Findlay gave about creating place names in Ancestral Quest, or they have chosen to ignore that advice. He suggested that if we want to be able to use the ability of AQ to select particular groups of places for events in the records, we will need to construct place names in the following format:

City, County, State or Province, Country.

It seems like an easy task, but after viewing many files while trying to help others, I have seen three deviations from this format which appear consistently:

1. Cemetery, City, County, State, Country
2. Church, City, County, State, Country
3. Hospital, City, County, State, Country

AQ will accept these formats for place names and report them faithfully but at this point if an alternate format is used, the ability to select by position in the place name is lost.

It is the comma which defines the position within the place name. Everything up to the first comma is considered by AQ to be the City for selection purposes. Everything after the first comma and up to the second comma is in the County field. Everything after the second comma and up to the third comma is the State or Province, and everything after the third comma, including other commas, is the Country. The Country field now extends only to a comma (if present) for the purpose of selection. For reporting, everything after the comma following State or Provence is considered the Country.

It is possible to have retained part of the positional representation by using these formats:

1. City, County, State, Country, Cemetery
2. City, County, State, Country, Church
3. City, County, State, Country, Hospital

It would still be impossible to identify countries this way because the country name would also have contained the name of the Cemetery, Church or Hospital.

I don’t have the date of the change, but at present Country is presented as everything after the comma ending the State or Province field on screens and in reports, however when using the radio button ‘3 (State)’ in Advanced Filter/Focus only the portion up to the first comma in the Country field is used for comparison and selection. additional information can be added beyond a comma, but that information will not be considered in the comparison of Country names.

This is where logic would tell us to use the Contains operator since it doesn’t depend on the position of the state name in the place name.

Let’s start our report using the Contains method. We would begin by building a Custom Report with the fields we want to examine.

When the fields and sorting order have been determined, click on the Select button.

It is at this point that we will go to the Advanced Filter/Focus and tell AQ to select any record that contains our desired state name in any place name.

Highlight the Any Place field and use the > button to push it into the Current Filter.

Since we are not using positional notation, click on the Full Place radio button. Select Contains from the pull-down window. Enter the name of the state you want to select, and click the OK button.

Our Current Filter looks good, so click on the OK button.

AQ tells us how many records were selected, and we click the OK button.

If we are printing to a PDF file, we click Print, otherwise click Preview. As you examine the report you may notice records which have no place names within are not from Utah or your selected state. How can that be?

Counties and cities across the USA are named after states. Many have their own state name, but this would not be a problem since that’s the state we wanted anyway. The problem is that many counties and cities are named after states other than their own. Here is a list of states that could appear on your list if you select a state which has the name of a county or city equal to or containing the name you selected. This list does not show such places as Kiowa County in Arkansas and Kansas, and it does not show cities with multiple word names.

In the following list, you will see the states in alphabetical order. To the right of the state name, you will see either the name of a county or a city in that state which has the name of a different state.

Here is the list:

If you have followed the advice given as to how to form place names, you can instead follow the same procedure as before up to this place:

Here you would click on the 3 (State) radio button, select Matches from the pull-down window, Enter the name of the desired state, and click OK. If your place names are all built correctly, you will get only the records you wanted.

Suggestions/Questions about AQ Will Do or Subjects discussed here? Click the Comment tab. I would like to hear from you!

Obituaries

Dale ♦ 2023/09/09 ♦ Leave a comment

In my post Find the Dead I showed a way to Google for an obituary. The way I showed works, but there is a “cleaner” way to do it, and there is a better way to search for married females.

First: Cleaner. Originally I recommended that we enter a Google search such as:

obituary Clyde McIntyre 1999

This search returns the following:

I then recommended that we copy the URL line that was returned, and paste it into the URL box in the Add/Edit Favorite Site screen. Here is the broken down for size URL returned from this search:

“https://www.google.com/search”

“?q=obituary+clyde+mcintyre+1999”

“&rlz=1C1JZAP_enUS858US858”

“&oq=obituary+Clyde+McIntyre+1999”

“&aqs=chrome.0.69i59l2j69i60.17486j0j9”

“&sourceid=chrome”

“&ie=UTF-8”

There are four parameters in the “?q=” part of the search: obituary, Clyde, McIntyre and 1999. I then recommended that we edit this URL and replace the last three of these parameters with the codes which will tell AQ where to find the same information for the current AQ individual record. That would leave us with this URL, here broken down into its separate parts:

“https://www.google.com/search”
“?q=obituary+%%FN%%+%%LN%%+%%DY%%”
“&rlz=1C1JZAP_enUS858US858”
“&oq=obituary+Clyde+McIntyre+1999”
“&aqs=chrome.0.69i59l2j69i60.17486j0j9”
“&sourceid=chrome”
“&ie=UTF-8”

If we use this URL, AQ will examine it and replace the codes %%FN%%, %%LN%% and %%DY%% with the first name, last name and death year of your current AQ individual. That still leaves this string in the middle of the Google search:

&oq=obituary+Clyde+McIntyre+1999

…and that has nothing to do with a search for the obituary of a different person in our family file. It will still work, but I prefer the “cleaner” way of doing it:

https://www.google.com/search?q=obituary+%%FN%%+%%LN%%+%%DY%%

Just my personal preference. It seems a lot easier to understand, besides that is all Google needs to do the search.

Second: I have seen obituaries where the maiden name of a married female is never seen in the text. Those who submitted the obituary used only her married name and either didn’t or couldn’t list the names of her parents. That makes it harder to find her from AQ because her record in AQ is, by default, stored with her maiden name as her surname. Because of this, I recommend a second search for married females which looks like this…

https://www.google.com/search?q=obituary+%%FN%%+%%SLN%%+%%DY%%

…where %%SLN%% will be replaced with the surname of the spouse. But First lets create the Obituaty (Male or Unmarried) version of the Google search.

Beginning by clicking on the Internet tab…

…here is what the entire NEW process would look like:

Click Favorite sites. This will return the My Favorite Web Sites screen…

…where we click on the Add button. That gives us the Add/Edit Favorite Site screen…

…where we type the Title:

Obituary (Male or Unmarried)

and the URL:

https://www.google.com/search?q=obituary+%%FN%%+%%LN%%+%%DY%%

and click the Search this site check box. Now click the OK button. This returns us to the My Favorite Web Sites screen…

…where we click on Close. This returns us to our Edit Individual screen. Now for the obituary with no maiden name. Click on the Internet tab.

This brings up the Internet Menu:

Here we will click on Favorite Sites, which brings up the My Favorite Web Sites screen.

Here we click on Add, to bring up the Add/Edit Favorite Site screen.

We enter the Title:

Obituary (Married Female)

We enter the URL:

https://www.google.com/search?q=obituary+%%FN%%+%%SLN%%+%%DY%%

…where we are asking for the Spouse Last Name, and we click the Search this site check box. Now we click OK, which returns us to the My Favorite Web Sites screen…

…which shows us the two new entries. Click Close, and you are now set to go…

…well, almost.

Now that we have a way to find an obituary, what are we going to do?

Lets click on the Internet tab…

…and bring up the Internet menu.

We will click on Search Favorite Sites. This brings up the Search a Web Site screen…

…where we will highlight Obituary (Married Female) and click on the Perform Internet Search button.

This brings us the result of the Google search. There are three importrant things returned from this search. There is a link to an obituary at lindquistmortuary.com and a link to an obituary at legacy.com. (That’s two of the three. Note, I haven’t shown the third, but it will be here soon) We can use either of these obiruaries, however there is an advantage to using the legacy.com version. Legacy.com includes obituaries found on the websites of several mortuaries and several newspapers. This can simplify documenting the source of this obituary. Since Legacy.com doesn’t perform all the services of a mortuary or of a newspaper, they are a specialized business. They do obituaries. Their business is being a repository of obituaries. I believe they are a reliable source of permanent obituary retention. I will set up legacy.com as a repository. Click on the Edit tab…

…and click on Repository List. This brings up the Edit Repository List screen.

Note, I already have this repository, but I will show you how to create it. Type Legacy.com in the Repositories box and click on Add.

In the Define Repository Address box, enter the address of Legacy.com, then click the OK button. This will return you to the Edit Repositories List screen where you will click the Close button. Now ckick on the Edit tab…

…and click on Source List. I already have Legacy.com on my list, but you will need to type Legacy.com into the top box and click the Add button. This will take you to the Create Source screen. Mine already exists, so I will show you what to do by showing you what I did.

I clicked the Edit button to enter the link to the Legacy.com site. I clicked the Repository button to select Legacy.com as my repository, and I filled in the other fields as you see them. What you enter here is up to you. When you are finished, click the OK button. This returns you to the Create Source screen where you will click the OK button. In the Edit Source List click the Close button.

Now that you can get the obituary and show the source, where will you put it?

Click the Edit tab.

Click on Event Types. This brings up the Define Other Events screen. (You see the word Edit because I already had the Obituary (online) event type.)

Click on the Add Type button. This brings up the Define Other Event – User Defined screen.

I named this Obituary (Online) because I already had an event named Obituary which works differently. I selected a Single date as the only input because its sole purpose is to move the event to the bottom of the list. You will need to create an event sentence in the Sentence Usage area. You can copy this next line into it…

%(%2;%3) has an online obituary. (Click Edit then *Source to View the obituary)

…if it will make it easier for you. (or create some other sentence if you like)

All of the important information is stored in the Source of the Other Event. Lets add the event. Remember that we already did the Google search and found an obituary published by Legacy.com.

From the Other Events block on the Edit Individual screen, click on the Add button. This brings up the Select Event for… screen.

Scroll down to the Obituary (online) event and Select it. This will return the Obituary (online) – Individual screen.

Enter the date of the death or the burial date, then click the Source button. This brings up the Select Source for Obituary (online) screen.

Scroll down to the Legacy.com source and click the Select button. When we ran the Google search and returned the obituary, the URL line of that screen held the information we need. (I told you there were three important things.)

Copy it…

…and paste it into the Line/Page/Film# box, then click the Attach button. This brings up the Add Scrapbook Item… screen.

Open the Item Type pull down window and select Other. Paste the URL into the Filename or URL box, and click the OK button.

Note that the URL is now in the Atachment box and the Attach button now reads Edit. If you click the View button, the browser will display the obituary, and that was the whole point of all this. AQ is now storing the link to the online obituary for this individual. You can retrieve it by editing the Obituary (online) event and viewing the attachment in the source. Click the OK button, then click the next OK button.

Note that the Obituary (online) event is now added to the Other Events list, and the X shows that it has a source.

Find Find_A_Grave

Dale ♦ 2023/09/06 ♦ 7 Comments

In the Find-A-Grave post we talked about a way to document and source Find-A-Grave within Ancestral Quest. We started by saying that we need to either find the Find-A-Grave entry for an individual or create one if it isn’t already there. That leads to an interesting question. How can I go about finding an individual on Find-A-Grave from within Ancestral Quest? We will start by first finding someone from outside AQ. We will enter the following URL into our browser:

findagrave.com.

Our browser retruns the search screen with fields where we can enter search criteria. Here are those search fields:

First we will enter some search criteria:

Notice that the Find-A-Grave search form has a place for the first name and another place for the middle name. Ancestral Quest stores the surname in one place and all given names in another place. It is important to make note of this difference. Now we will click the Search button. Find-A-Grave finds the record we are looking for, but what we really want is the URL which Find-A-Grave created to do the actual search:

This is way too long, and therefore way too small to see, so to display what the URL looks like, we will highlight the URL line and type <CTRL> C to copy the URL. Below is the URL that was used, however the URL is too long to print it on one line, so I will break the URL into the individual parts:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/search
?firstname=Arley ———- We entered the first name Arley
&middlename=
&lastname=George ——- We entered the last name George
&birthyear=1917 ———- We entered the birth year 1917
&birthyearfilter=
&deathyear=1988 ——— We entered the death year 1988
&deathyearfilter=
&location=
&locationId=
&memorialid=
&mcid=
&linkedToName=
&datefilter=
&orderby=r ————— We did not enter the ‘r’ but since it is there we will leave it
&plot=

These parts placed side by side in the same order with no spaces between form the URL and the search key. Now how does this information help us? Lets look back at the Ancestral Quest Menu Bar:

Click on the Internet tab. This brings up the Internet Menu:

Click on Favorite Sites. This will bring up the My Favorite Web Sites screen:

As you can see, I already have two FindAGrave sites named. One is used to search for males and unmarried females. The other searches for married females. By default, Ancestral Quest saves females under their maiden name. Married females are typically added to Find-A-Grave under the surname of their husband. Searching for a married female under her maiden name usually fails.

Please note that each site name in the My Favorite Web Sites screen is followed by either a P or an S. The P tells Ancestral Quest that the URL can be passed to the browser without inserting any values from the record of the currently highlighted person in AQ. Those with an S will be inserting values into the search string before passing it to the browser. Now click on the Add button. This brings up the Add/Edit Favorite Site screen:

As you can see, I am showing you how I created the search for males and unmarried females. I have copied the URL that Find-A-Grave returned to us into the URL field in the Add/Edit Favorite Site screen. Note that I have also placed a check in the Search this site check box to show AQ that it must place values from the current Individual record into the search string.

Look at the list of parameters in the center of the Add/Edit Favorite Site screen. Compare what you see there with the information returned in the URL line of the screen that Find-A-Grave returned to us. They returned ?firstname=Arley and our parameter list has both %%FN%% – First Name (All Given Names) and %%FO%% – First Given Name Only. Find-A-Grave stores the name ike this:

Arley______________________ First Name

Wallace____________________ Middle Name

George_____________________ Last Name

Ancestral Quest stores the name like this:

Arley Wallace______________ Given Names

George_____________________ Surname

%%FN%% tells Ancestral Quest to place Arley Wallace in the search string, but Find-A-Grave has neither a First Name nor a Middle Name equal to Arley Wallace. The %%FO%% tells Ancestral Quest to take only the Arley part of the Given Names and place that into the search string.

Serious genealogists would never store the name of Robert Winsloe Allen as Bobby Allen in their AQ file, so it is a good idea to store the name pretty much the way it would be listed on a birth certificate. The name Bobby will probably never match anything in a search if it should have been Robert.

Of the fifteen possible parts of the search string, we used only four, yet that was enough for Find-A-Grave to find our record.

So far we have copied the URL returned to us by Find-A-Grave into the URL field, but not everyone in our file is named Arley George, and they weren’t all born in 1917, and they didn’t all die in 1988. We need a way to tell AQ to take those corresponding parts of our current Individual record and place them into the search string, no matter what the names and dates are. That is why we have that list of parameters. We need to search through the URL and replace the names and dates with the codes which tell AQ to find that information from our currently active individual and place it into the search string:

Here is the first name Arley, which we had entered into the Find-A-Grave search form. Here we need to substitute the name with a parameter so that Ancestral Quest will know what information to place in that part of the search string:

Instead of Arley we will enter %%FO%%. This tells AQ to place only the first part of the given name of the current individual in this place. We continue looking to the right in the URL:

Here is where we find George, the surname, and 1917, the birth year:

In place of George, we will enter %%LN%% so that AQ will know to place the surname from the current record here. We will substitute 1917 with the code %%BY%% so that AQ will insert the birth year here. We keep moving to the right:

Here we find 1988, his death year:

We replace it with %%DY%% then we move to the bottom of the screen and click the OK button, and AQ adds FindAGrave (Male or Unmarried) to the list of possible Favorite Site searches.

Now we will go back to FindAGrave.com and enter Arley’s wife Evaleen Hulet:

We will leave the Middle Name and Cemetery Location fields blank, and click on the Search button. Find_a_Grave is unable to find her record because at the time of her death she was entered into Find-A-Grave as Evaleen George. We need to tell AQ to use the surname of her husband instead of her maiden name. Here are the steps we take as we copy the URL that Find-A-Grave just returned to us. If we look at the individual parts of the URL, they look like this:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/search
?firstname=Evaleen ——- We entered the first name Evaleen
&middlename=
&lastname=Hulet ——— We entered the last name Hulet
&birthyear=1924 ———- We entered the birth year 1924
&birthyearfilter=
&deathyear=2021——— We entered the death year 2021
&deathyearfilter=
&location=
&locationId=
&memorialid=
&mcid=
&linkedToName=
&datefilter=
&orderby=r ————— We did not enter the ‘r’ but since it is there we will leave it
&plot=

We will copy this URL into the URL: field in the Add/Edit Favorite Site screen. These are the things we see as we scan and update that URL:

Here we will replace Hulet with a different code. We will use %%SLN%%, which means spouse’s last name. The rest of the replacements are the same as we did before:

We go to the bottom of the screen and click the OK button, and AQ adds FindAGrave (Married Female) to the list of favorite sites.

Roots Tech Connect 2021

Dale ♦ 2021/02/25 ♦ Leave a comment

It is finally here. Roots Tech Connect 2021. In the past there have been many reasons to not attend Roots Tech. Too far away, too expensive, too inconvenient, just to name a few. Who could take 1-3 days off work and travel to Salt Lake City, Utah?

Now the excuses are gone! It isn’t too far away, it’s on your Desktop, Laptop, Tablet, or Phone. It isn’t too expensive, it’s FREE. It isn’t inconvenient. Even though the event is listed as being held 25 Feb 2021 – 27 Feb 2021, the presentations will all be available at least until Roots Tech 2022 begins.

https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/rtc2021 is the URL to get you there, or click the link above.

ADDENDUM

Well, RootsTech is over, but the links to the venders are still available. I haven’t heard an actual final date, but as I said, I have heard some say that it should be available until RootsTech2022 takes its place. The link above is still active, and it points to the URL listed above.

If you go to the Expo Hall and scroll down, you will see that Ancestral Quest is one of the Bronze Sponsors. If you click that icon it will take you to the Ancestral Quest Virtual Booth. When you are there, click on the Connect button on the lower right corner. That’s where you can join a chat room of people interested in AQ. If you instead click on Direct Messages and scroll down from there, you will see a list of people registered for RootsTech who are related to you. You can click on them and chat with them. They will see your message when they next login to RootsTech.

If you continue to scroll down you will see an invitation to view the ‘Map of My Relatives.’ Here you will see how many of those who registered for RootsTech are related to you. You will also see some of them listed along the left side of the screen. Click on one and you will see that you can Send a Message, View Relationship or Add Friend. View Relationship shows the relative you clicked, then it travels up that ancestry as many as 12 generations, looking for a relative common to both of you. When found, it travels down the other leg of the ladder to show you at the bottom. You can send messages to relatives you may not know, and start a new friendship. You can add relatives to a Friend List. I tried it, but I don’t know yet how to find my Friends List. Let me know if you have had better luck.

One caveat. To use all of the features you must have an account at FamilySearch, and you must be logged on to FamilySearch and RootsTech to get all features to work.

Use the User’s Guide

Dale ♦ 2021/01/30 ♦ Leave a comment

Incline Software produces a book called Ancestral Quest User’s Guide. It is available in the United States as a paperback, and around the world as a PDF file. It has 545 pages. I use it when I need to understand how to do some of the less common things that AQ Will Do.

If you would like to own this manual, you can get it from this website:

https://www.ancquest.com/orderonline.htm#AQ16BM (This is a link)

When the screen appears, scroll down to the section labeled Training Aids for Ancestral Quest.

My computer isn’t close to my book cases, so I buy this book in PDF format. I keep it and its predecessors in the C:/Data/AQ/Manual/ path.

My memory isn’t what it was when I was younger, and I don’t like searching around to find where my manual is, so I let AQ go get it for me.

My last post described how to get AQ to search with Google for obituaries. AQ passes a string to your browser, and the browser executes the string. Typically we think of the browser as a way to access the internet, but that isn’t all it can do. It can also access files on the computer’s file system.

You have probably seen references to websites which begin with the characters https://. The https stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure. Browsers can also execute strings beginning with file://. One such statement might be:

file://C:/Data/AQ/Manual/AQ16_UsersGuide.pdf

This is the string we will use to access the Ancestral Quest User’s Guide. The process is just like the process we used to access the Google website, but this time we will go, not to the internet, but to the hard drive, or some other device known to the file system.

To begin, click on the Internet tab at the top of your AQ screen, then select the Favorite Sites menu item. When the My Favorite Web Sites screen appears, click on the Add button. The Add/Edit Favorite Site screen appears.

Fill in the Title and URL boxes. Note that the Search this site** checkbox is not checked, so AQ will pass this string directly to the browser.

You will probably need to change the string in the URL box because the path to the folder where you store your User’s Guide will not be the same as mine. Store the guide wherever you want, but put the path to the file between the file:// and the AQ16_UsersGuide.pdf.

When the User’s Guide opens, you can use the <CTRL>F keys to find any topic contained in the book. The ^ and ˅ characters will allow you to skip through the text to prior or next occurance of the desired word(s).

When AQ comes out with a new major version and a new User’s Guide, you can buy the guide, and store it in the same folder with the older version, then click the Internet tab and select the Favorite Sites menu item. There you can click the modify button and update the name of the file.