Flags: Examples
Examples of Flag Use, From ReunionTalk

Once upon a time, a ReunionTalk member asked, "I have wondered for some time what the "Flags" function could be used for... It might be an interesting study of how people use it."

The following responses (excerpted) rolled in...


I flag "unrelated people" or "potential relatives" as "Stray." This allows me to obtain an immediate listing of all the "strays." Very useful!


I have defined custom flags for:

Never Married - when I know that a person lived to adulthood but never married.

Related to Spouse - when I know that a person was related to his/her spouse. In this case I set the flag for both spouses in their family record.

I also use the Earliest Ancestor flag which is one of the pre-defined flags in Reunion. I set this flag for the person at the top of each of my various lines. Searching for people with this flag makes it very easy to quickly locate the top of each line. You could also use the Mark Groups feature and create a marked set for this group of people for quick recall but then you have to regenerate the set whenever you find the parent(s) of a previous earliest ancestor. By using the flag, you just remove the flag from the previous earliest ancestor and set it for the new earliest ancestor in that line.

I have also added the Flags line to my default family view, so when I am navigating through my database, it will be immediately obvious whenever I select an individual with a flag set.


Being Australian, I use the flags to mark ancestors that came out here as convicts. It saves me a lot of time in finding them in my file, and it tells me straight away which indexes and databases to go to when I'm searching for information on them. I'm also considering taking the military flag and setting up a flag for each conflict my ancestors served in. This will also help in directing my searches of the archives.
While we may not have many folks in our datafile, there are enough so that we occasionally found ourselves looking at the screen, asking, "Who the heck is that?" We finally helped to resolve this problem by the use of Flags.

We created four flags, one for each of our grandparent's lines. Then we created flags for each of the significant branches within those families. Finally, we created flags which would describe our relationship to that person.

The result? On every family, we see something like:

Flags: Smith family, Dorothy's descendants, distant cousin.
or:
Flags: Smith family, DIRECT ANCESTOR.
or:
Flags: Smith family, Freeburg branch, by marriage.

Now when we browse (when using marked records, for example), when we see an unfamiliar name, the flags give us a good idea where they belong.


I use Clergy and Military, particularly; I also added one for Religious, since nuns and monks aren't strictly "clergy." One branch of the family has a large number of priests and nuns, and it's been handy to sort by those flags. It's also really handy to be able to only look at the folk with military service, when one is knee-deep in military records.

I like [the] Link Uncertain flag, a lot.


At the moment I use the following flags:

Celebrity: to denote well-known people in my database.

Deceased: to denote people known to be dead.

Heather's side: to denote people on my wife's side of the family.

Immigrant ancestor: to denote my ancestors who came to America.

Include anyway: to denote people who I want to include in reports and web pages even though my privacy criteria might normally say to exclude them.

Private: to denote people who I do not want to include in reports and web pages.

Normally when making reports or web pages, I'll mark people who have neither "Deceased" nor "Include anyway" checked, set the "Private" flag for them, and then turn on the Privacy filter for people with the "Private" flag set.


I use it for anything that I might want to search on at some time in the future, and that isn't already in a field. Flags work better than Mark Sets for this, because there is no easy way to add or remove individuals from an existing set. (You can do it, but it takes about five steps.)

Most of them are "resource to be checked" flags, like:

Look for obituary

Look for X census (where X is a year)

Look for death certificate

etc.

I'll set these flags if I'm looking at a record, and I notice that I have some missing information that might be in that type of resource.

Then when I go to the National Archives to search censuses, or to a library that has newspaper microfilms, etc., I can do a search on "Any field has <locality of the records I'm searching>" AND the particular resource's "Look for" flag is set.

After I've searched the resource, I will turn off the flag. If I didn't find the data I was looking for, I'll make a notation that I checked the resource and didn't find it, so that I will know not to turn the flag back on again later in the future. (Sometimes this notation is in the regular Misc Notes, other times it is in a user-defined field called "Non-printing Research Notes," depending on whether I think the information that the data was not found would be of interest to other people reading my reports or not.)

I also have a flag for "Don't post to web" that I turn on for individuals that someone has asked me not to put online, and that don't match the default privacy criteria. (Generally people who have died, but their family members don't want them listed anyway.)


I use several flags besides the ones supplied with Reunion. I'm particularly interested in keeping track of Civil War and Revolutionary War soldiers; people born before 1700 (I should really have created a flag for each century, but with nearly 9000 people it's too late now); immigrants; clergymen; earliest ancestors; Mayflower passengers; and Unconnected.

When I get around to some of my historical work, I'd like to flag several counties. At present, I just use the county name in a search when I need to.


I recently made a flag up when I was going through a census. It's called "Possible relation?" I imagine it serves a similar purpose to [the] "Link Uncertain" flag.
I flagged all my "immigrant" ancestors — the first to reach American shores. Then I did a "list" printout of all my immigrant ancestors and those of my husband. This lists where they were born and where they died. Before taking a trip to France and later a trip to England, I looked at the map pretty carefully before booking into bed and breakfast hotels. I wanted to be near good tourist sites in England, but not miss some of my ancestral sites, so I booked smack in the middle. I can happily say that I managed to visit even some of the tiniest villages my known immigrant ancestors came from! These flags made it much easier to plan our trip.

Along these lines, I'm sure others could plan a trip to given states in the US by doing the same. It would sure make research in local libraries easier!


Some of my flags:

Needs editing [before sharing data; may indicate that working notes contain reminders of data still to be extracted from a specific source on hand, or that contradictory info still needs to be resolved, etc.; a quick way to check if cards marked for a GEDCOM export need attention first]

Needs research [requires more involved research than "needs editing"]

Note that preceding these flags (or other flags most useful to you) with asterisks brings them to the top of the otherwise alphabetized list of flags, thereby assuring that they will always be visible in the on-screen display, as well as making them easily accessible for setting.

Died in childbirth

Died in infancy

Died young

Don't share beyond [i.e., delete descendants before sharing data; especially useful when others have shared "private" information that would not fall under the usual privacy delimiters, but which they have requested not be shared further]

Earliest [known] ancestor [in given line]

Immigrant [but not necessarily an ancestor]

Immigrant ancestor

Immigrated with parent

Issue [but name(s) unknown]

No issue [confirmed]

Unmarried [confirmed]

Some quite specific to my own research, for which you might have equivalents:

Besse's Sufferings [person appears in this record of Quaker persecutions]

Krefelders [or immigrants from specific location who arrived together]

Trustee of WYBG [trustees from various branches of the family whose actions were governed by a single will]


Obituary searched

A bit of context here. The Minnesota Historical Society has a Library Reference Service which will search for obituaries or other newspaper accounts if you provide the name, date, and location to search (limit of two events per letter request). They will then provide a photocopy of the article for a very modest fee. So I have had many occasions to make use of this service.

Obituary

Obvious, one (or more) has been found and included.

Research Problems

Serious conflicts in data that need to be checked, etc.


I use flags to tell me whose and what certificates I have.
Another possible flag is Name changed for legal name changes. I don't use this for simple spelling variations or spelling evolution of a surname, but rather for a person who has had a legal name change for whatever reason.
I use a Discrepancy flag to make note of areas where there are conflicts with my data — such as the great uncle who keeps getting younger as the years pass.

...something I use flags for: to mark other family archivists, known or rumored.


Flags for One Name Studies

Since my work is more of a one-name study than the history of a particular family, I created flags to show which family group a person belongs to. Or, if no flag is set, it designates that the person has not been placed with any of the major families in my file. I also use flags to distinguish my maternal side from my paternal side.


I allot a flag to each person in a given line. The flag name is based on the earliest place-name of the earliest ancestor of that line, e.g: Darlington/1, York/2, Exeter/5, etc.

Thus, every person descended from an ancestor born (or married, if that's the only known place) in Exeter will have the same flag. It's easy to fill in the flags, using the "set flags" command.

If and when one line is merged with another, the flags are adjusted - the flag of the smaller group is deleted and those people allotted the flag of the bigger group - so that all the people in the new, bigger line now have the same flag as the earliest ancestor.

I've got dozens of flags for my various "islands" of families. That way, I can bring up all the people in a given group.


I do a one-name study and I am bound to research every occurrence of the name in question. I have come across hundreds of instances where no relationship is evident, but record the person all the same... I end up with little islands of a few people — sometimes just one person — who do not connect to my 'main' group.

In order to organize these islands, I flag each member of them, giving the flag the name of the earliest recorded place (whether B, M or D place) plus a number if there is more than one group with the same name: Hemingborough/1 or Durham/2 for instance. When a new unrelated person is found, it gives me a sporting chance to fit them into one of the existing groups. I have dozens of such flagged groups and find it very useful indeed.