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Articles will be posted here regarding how to perform certain tasks with Clooz.

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

Clooz Reporting Features

Clooz’s Unique Analysis Tools (Coming soon)

The Analysis Pivot Grid

The Analysis Pivot Grid tool provides a powerful and intuitive interface for you to display, organize, and analyze various combinations of the Sources, Information Records, events and family groups entered into Clooz. The pivot grid offers dynamic filtering, sorting, grouping and summarization capabilities to help you easily uncover patterns and insight into your data. Look for migration patterns or assess the coverage of your research in various locations or time frames. The possibilities are endless.

Early Census Review

Early U.S. censuses (prior to 1850) and several Canadian censuses only identify the head of household and provide counts of persons living in the household. The Early Census tool in Clooz provides a way to compare the household counts across multiple years, or between different households in the same year. Clooz uses a display layout developed by J. Mark Lowe presented at a National Genealogical Society conference in 2013.

Subject Comparison Window

Often when you are gathering documentation in your research you may not be convinced that the documentation you have found applies to the person your are researching. The names might be the same, but proving that identities match requires a bit more review. It’s advisable to create new Subject records for persons when you are not sure it’s the same person as represented by another Subject record. The Subject Comparison tool in Clooz allows you to compare all the information you have collected for different Subjects to determine if they are indeed the same person, or perhaps have some relationship between them (such as parent or child).

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.

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.