Ralph Higginbotham, Sr. and Mary Henthorn

Ralph Higginbotham, Sr. and Mary Henthorn

There is a link from the Higginbotham and Henthorn families to the Ice family. This couple had daughters, Margaret and Mary.  They both married William Galloway "Indian Billy" Ice.  He was also married a third time.

I am sharing a four-generation (9-page) Descendant List for Ralph Higginbotham, Sr. and Mary Henthorn, in the PDF format, which summarizes what is known about the descendants in this family. The PDF is stored on my Box account.

If you know anything about the members of these three families and are willing to share, I'd appreciate it.

Descendant List

Dick Henthorn

31 August 2014

Sharing a File

There are some genealogy files stored on my Box account. I restrict access.

Today I'm test sharing a link to a document in my Box account. This is a Hardesty piece about John Devaul of Monroe Co., OH. It's a "text" file of one page. 

John's first wife was Elizabeth Henthorne, a daughter of James and Elizabeth Rachel Henthorne.

I also shared the link on Facebook.  That worked.

John Devaul Biography

Dick Henthorn
30 August 2014

Who Is "Place Holder?"

Here's a problem you might encounter when you are ready to prepare an Ahnentafel (Ancestor Chart).  What do you do if the couple of interest didn't have any children?  If you have data about the ancestral lines of both members of the couple and you choose one or the other you will only have half of the data in your report.

Here's my solution to this problem.  I create a child record for the couple.  I name the child "Place Holder."  I can even include some information in the Note of this record to explain what I'm doing. I select "Place Holder" as the starting person for my report and the problem is solved. After I generate the report I delete the record for "Place Holder."  If I forget to delete the record I can always easily find any records for "Place Holder" by searching for that name or looking at the sorted name list in the RootsMagic display.

Dick Henthorn
29 August 2014

Two Screen Computer Setup

This is not a photo of my setup

I have a two-screen computer setup. The larger screen is a ViewSonic 1080p which is elevated behind the screen of my Toshiba laptop.  The larger screen has the best resolution of the two.  My eyes are still good enough to allow me to easily read the display even though it is about two feet away.

I've found this two-display setup to be very useful, especially when I am working on genealogy.  I display my genealogy program, RootsMagic on the big screen and I display my  free "text editor," EditPad Lite on the laptop. This is very handy when I want to add information from a text file to my genealogy file. For example, right now I am working with some information I found in a GEDCOM file on the Internet.  I loaded the GEDCOM into a "new" genealogy file and then opened that file in RootsMagic.  When I find some information in the Notes of the new file I copy the Note and paste it into my text editor.

The genealogy program allows me to have more than one genealogy file open at a time.  I have the "new" genealogy file open and I have my own file open, the one that I am updating. I select my own genealogy file as the "active" file and I refer to the laptop screen to see the information I want to enter into my own file. I'm using this technique to add records to my file. The GEDCOM file often has census and obituary information that includes information about people who don't have records in the GEDCOM.

Dick Henthorn
28 August 2014

Marriage Notes

I discovered that some of the records I'm importing from a GEDCOM file have Marriage Notes. This field is new to me.  None of the records I created with Personal Ancestral File (PAF) have this field.

I discovered that the Marriage Notes print just below the marriage data in the RootsMagic descendant report. That's good. For readability in the descendant reports I like to see a blank line before and after the Marriage Notes.  To make this happened I needed to add two blank lines before and after each Marriage Note. I don't understand why two lines are necessary. It doesn't matter, once I figured out that I needed to insert the blank lines.

Dick Henthorn
27 August 2014

Rule18 - Clipboard Loader

I use some snippets of text over and over in the Notes of my genealogy files.  I needed a clipboard loader program that would allow me to load archived snippets into the Windows7 clipboard.

I found a free program called, Rule18 which I've been using for months. You can create any number of snippet files with many snippets within each file.  For example, you could have a file with snippets you use when working on your genealogy and another file for snippets you use when working on your organization's newsletter.

I load the program when I start working on genealogy and leave it running in the background. I load the genealogy snippet file at start-up. Then any snippet in that file can be loaded to the Windows clipboard with the assigned hotkeys.  I have an icon for the program in the tool tray at the bottom of the screen.  This allows me to pop the program onto the screen when I can't remember what hotkeys I assigned to a particular snippet.

At first I used CTRL + n  (where "n" is a digit from 1-9) as my hotkeys.  Later, I added CTRL + A (where "A" is one of the letters of the alphabet.  I don't remember why I used capital letters.)  I couldn't make the ALT hotkeys work.

Rule18 is a clipboard assistant focused for presenters but can be used by anyone who needs snippets of text to be copied into the Windows clipboard at the press of a specific hotkey. No more copy/paste from notepad!
It is developed in C# using Visual Studio 2010.

Rule18 homepage

Rule18 documentation

If you have any questions I'll try to help.

Dick Henthorn

26 August 2014

RootsMagic Learning Curve

Recently I acquired a huge GEDCOM file with information about the descendants of Ralph Higginbotham and Mary Henthorn.  While working with this information I've been learning more about how RootsMagic works and how to use it.  It's challenging.  For several weeks I've been considering posting here about some of my experiences.  Today I decided to stop thinking about it, and just do it.

I'm Facebook friends with the programmer of RootsMagic, Bruce Buzbee.  In response to a comment I made Bruce suggested that I might avoid duplication problems if I created a "new" genealogy file for the records of people that I intend to copy to my own file.  That way it is easy to carry out any necessary edits and it is easy to understand the scope of the branch that I'm working on. Good advice, that I've used to my advantage several times in the last couple of weeks.

BTW, does anyone remember who were the parents of this Mary Henthorn?  Can we cite a source?

Dick Henthorn
25 Aug 2014