What is GIM LISTS? Simply put, GIM LISTS provides you with a way to search through your folder for a list of people, families, or notes which meet a set of criteria, such as couples with a marriage date but no marriage place, or people who died between the ages of, say, 15 and 18.
Why use GIM LISTS? GIM LISTS is a powerful tool for finding possible errors in your folder. For example, you can use it to search for persons who, according to the data in your folder, "died" before they were born. GIM LISTS is a powerful tool for finding those notes that you remember writing, but you may not remember where you put them. GIM LISTS can search through all the notes in your folder for the notes you want to find. GIM LISTS is a powerful tool for finding those ancestors whose LDS temple ordinances are not yet complete. For those researchers with an interest in LDS temple work, GIM LISTS can spotlight those ancestors who need their temple work done. GIM LISTS is a powerful tool for finding curiosities about your data, such as the oldest man and woman in your folder, or the youngest mother, or the longest marriage, or the number of women named Mary. GIM LISTS is also able to create lists of place names that are used in your folder, sorted in six different styles and formats. By looking over these place lists, you can learn a lot about any misspellings that appear in your folder, and whether any towns are in the wrong counties, or in no county at all.
The best way to show what GIM LISTS is all about is to start with a straightforward example. Let's suppose you want to make a list of all the German women in your folder.
What exactly is a list? Simply put, a "list" is a collection of things -- either people, families, notes, or places -- that all share something in common. Every list has a name (such as "Farmers" or "Single Parents"), and every list is sorted in some order (such as alphabetically by surname).
GIM LISTS already knows about three lists, called "All Persons", "All Families", and "All Notes". You don't have to do anything to create these; they always exist, and cannot be destroyed.
Any time you want to create a new list, you have to build it from an existing list. For example, you can use the list called "All Persons" to build a list called "Germans". Also for example, you can use this new list ("Germans") to create a third list called "German Women".
To make a new list, you need to tell GIM LISTS three or four things:
You give GIM LISTS this information with four commands.
GIM LISTS has about two dozen commands, each of which will be summarized in the next section ("A Glossary of GIM LISTS Commands with Examples"). For now, we are concerned with only five of them.
Now, look at what you've just typed:
MAKE German Women FROM All Persons WHERE any place contains "Germany" and gender is "F"
Those three lines together comprise a single thought, and taken together, they completely tell GIM LISTS what it is you want to find out.
When it's complete, you can use the DISPLAY command to display the members of the list. The DISPLAY command will be discussed in detail later, in the section entitled "How to Get the Most Out of the DISPLAY Command". For now, just type "DISPLAY" (without quotation marks) to see a list of the German Women in your folder.
You should read the previous basic example and make sure you understand it. Practice it, and practice some variations, and then read this section.
For this example, let's make a list of direct ancestors who were married exactly twice.
To start with, let's make a list of direct ancestors. After we've done that, we'll use that list to build another list of people who married exactly twice.
After reading the first example, the following GIM LISTS commands should be more or less familiar:
MAKE Direct Ancestors FROM All Persons WHERE gin NE 0
The only surprise here is the new WHERE command, which needs some explanation. In a roundabout way, it tells GIM LISTS to select only direct ancestors from the list of All Persons.
What does "NE" mean? The word "NE" is called an operator, whereas "gin" and "0" are operands -- things that the operator operates on. GIM LISTS provides scores of operators. Some operators represent "is not equal to"; others represent "is less than"; others represent dates that are on or before other dates -- such as a birth date before 1700. In the first example above, we saw two operators. One was the word "contains", and was used to find any place that contains the word "Germany". The other was the word "is", which is used to find a value that is the same as another value. These and other operators will be discussed in more detail later, in the section entitled "Operators Used in WHERE Commands". GIM LISTS provides a number of synonyms for each operator. Instead of using "NE" to mean "is not equal to", we could have used any of the following:
"<>" has meaning for Pascal and BASIC programmers; "!=" has meaning for C programmers; and "NE" has meaning for FORTRAN programmers. These provide a shorthand way of expressing the thought, but it would have been just as effective to use this... WHERE gin doesn't equal 0 ... in place of the WHERE command that we used.
Now that we've explained the WHERE command we used above, it should be clear that we're telling GIM LISTS to select direct ancestors from the list of All Persons, and to put those selections into a new list called "Direct Ancestors".
To have this command take effect, we type "GO" and press the enter key like we did before.
When GIM LISTS is finished, the new list is available for our use, and we can use it to create a second new list, which we will call "Double Marriages". By now you should have guessed how the command to do so will begin:
MAKE Double Marriages FROM Direct Ancestors WHERE spouses = 2
Now again, we have a new WHERE command, and we'll explain it briefly:
What is "spouses"? "Spouses" is another operand, like "gender" and "gin". It means "the number of times a person married", and is a number, just like the GIN number. All of the available operands will be discussed later, in the section entitled "Operands Used in WHERE Commands".
What is "="? Like "NE", "=" is an operator, and tests two numbers for equality. In this case, it is testing whether "spouses" (the number of times a person married) is equal to 2. Like "NE", there are a number of synonyms available for "=", including:
As you can see, once we type "GO" and press return, GIM LISTS will select only those members of the "Direct Ancestors" list who have exactly two spouses. Everyone who shows up in this new list will be both a direct ancestor AND will have two spouses.
Now, having said that, we can create this new list in one step instead of two by combining both WHERE commands into a single command. Study the following set of commands to see how this is done.
MAKE Direct Ancestors with Two Spouses FROM All Persons WHERE gin ne 0 and spouses eq 2 GO
For more information on the use of "AND" and "OR" in WHERE commands, see the section entitled "Conjunctions Used in WHERE Commands".