Social Security Numbers

I store Social Security information in the Note fields of my genealogy files.  I don't want the Social Security Numbers to print in reports that I share. The RootsMagic program has a way to "turn off" this information by surrounding any text that you don't want to appear in reports with curly brackets {Don't Print}.

I noticed recently that the file I created for my own family didn't have the curly brackets.  Today I completed the project to surround all of the Social Security Numbers with the curly brackets.  I also checked to see if I had set the switch to turn off printing anything surrounded by curly brackets.

Dick Henthorn
13 Mar 2017

Social Security Number Project

Today I finish the project to inclose all of the Social Security Numbers in the Notes of my Yoho file in curly brackets { }.  I spent eight days working on this project. 

In RootsMagic curly brackets are used to indicate information in the Notes that may or may not appear in output created by the program. 

There are three options for data surrounded by curly brackets:

1. information may appear with the curly brackets
2. information may appear without the curly brackets
3. information surrounded by the curly brackets and the brackets do not appear

There have been several occasions in the past when someone objected to Social Security Numbers appearing in the output from my genealogy even though the information is for deceased people. From now on I will have the option of turning off the output of the Social Security Numbers.

BTW, have you ever considered why the federal government didn't require middle names  when opening a Social Security Account?  Wouldn't that have reduced the possibility of errors?

Dick Henthorn

23 February 2015

Curly Brackets

From time to time someone has objected to the fact that I included information from the Social Security Death Index in the Note fields of my genealogy files.

One person pointed out that even though a family member was dead there was still someone in the family drawing Social Security benefits under the deceased person's Social Security number.

RootsMagic has an option that allows us to make parts of our Notes private. To do this you place curly brackets {private text} around any text in a Note that you may want to consider private.

There are three curly bracket options when you, print reports, export GEDCOM files or create websites.

• Remove the curly brackets and the text inside them
• Display the curly brackets and the text inside them
• Display the text inside the curly brackets without the brackets

I'm considering adding curly brackets around Social Security numbers in my largest genealogy file. This will give me the option of displaying the Social Security Death Index information with or without the Social Security Number.

To implement this idea, at this late date, won't be an easy task. There is no way to do a global search and replace.  While I can easily find each record that contains Social Security information it will be necessary to execute the find command thousands of times to find the Notes that need to be modified.

I've already tested this idea several times when I encountered Social Security data in the Note of records that I was updating.

Dick Henthorn

17 February 2015