Interfacing Clooz Documents with your Family Tree

Clooz provides a very powerful capability for you to export the people, events, sources and citations to your favorite family tree program where you can view the tree and produce all the typical charts.  Remember, Clooz is document-based and supports the research process you go through in building your family tree.  It is much more efficient to gather your information in Clooz first, and then transfer the information to your family tree only after you have properly completed its analysis and have drawn your conclusions.

Clooz provides two different tools to use for interfacing with other lineage-based family tree programs:

  • Data Transfer Manager (used for bulk transfers of people and sources, but not events)
  • Document Export function (used to export the people, events, sources and citations related to a single Clooz document)

The external database Clooz works with is chosen in the external file links window.   Clooz will track links with multiple external files, however, only the external file designated as "Primary " is active at any single moment.

A person in Clooz can be linked to a person in an external family tree database by one of several methods:

  • Importing or exporting the person in the Data Transfer Manager
  • Manually adding the external RIN number to the person listed in Clooz (Data Transfer Manager or Document Export function)
  • Exporting the person as part of a Document Export

 

Example of the Document Export form

Image of the Document Export form

Data Transfer Manager window (bulk transfers)

Image of the Clooz Data Transfer Manager window

Importing and exporting information to/from Clooz is the topic of several sections of the Clooz User Guide.

Clooz Reporting Features

Clooz has over 200 different report formats, which can be printed or exported as Adobe pdf, MS Excel, MS Word, rich text (rtf), or XML files.

 

Sample reports

Image of the Clooz report in list format
Sample non-tabular style report
Excel with Clooz census record displayed

A Unique Analysis Tool: Clooz’s Composite View

The Composite View is an alternate display format to the standard table-like grid. It presents documents and people in a tree-like structure allowing the researcher to examine possible relationships between the people in a document. But this doesn’t stop with just one document, but includes all of the documents for a given person. Then, the Composite View goes on to show all the people in in each of those documents, and so forth, up to 5 layers deep. This results in the display of a network of people connected through documents. It’s an excellent way to begin to identify friends, acquaintances, and neighbors, a good starting point for identifying further family relationships.

 

Hierarchical view of documents and people in them
Shows sources in a repository and information records in each source

Document Templates

Clooz provides over 230 different templates to match the types of information contained in the type of document you find.  You simply fill in as much of the information you find useful.  Keep in mind though that entering all available details gives you the most benefit down the road, especially fields that help define an event or family structure.   You never know when some seemingly unimportant detail today becomes of great interest in the future.

It is surprising how many people comment that going through the process of transcribing a document's details forces them to actual read the details and uncovering a relevant fact which they have missed looking at it many times before.

Sample Document Template - 1920 U.S. Census

Image of the entry form for the U.S. 1920 Census

Sample non-tabular style documents

Image of the form for entering details for a person from a non-tabular document

List of events extracted from the information record

List of family members as identified in this document