When the person highlighted in Pedigree View or Family View is linked to more than one spouse, RootsMagic 7 lets you select the one to be shown from the dropdown Spouse list. This list also offers a “Rearrange spouses” control which sets the order of the spouses in the dropdown list and the order in which spouses are displayed in the Descendant and Timeline Views, the Edit Person screen and in certain reports. The Rearrange Spouses dialog allows both manual ordering and “Sort by Marriage Date”. This control operates only on the spouses of one person at a time. A wish has been expressed for a global Sort by Marriage Date. Furthermore, an emigre from Family Tree Maker pointed out that it also factors in the birth date of the first child in the case of an unwed couple. These requests may never see the light of day within RootsMagic but here is a script that does the global job in the interim.
Some words of caution. For spouses without marriage events or children, neither the script nor the current RootsMagic function can do anything but sort them to the top of the list. And this script will override sequences arranged manually through RM’s Rearrange Spouses, if there are two or more of the spouses with either a marriage event or child birth event.
Developed using SQLiteSpy and should require no special extensions so it should run with any recent SQLite manager.
SpouseSort2.sql
2016-01-12 Superseded SpouseSort.sql to factor in birth/christen date of first-born children of unwed couples in the absence of a marriage event.
As always, test it on a copy of your database or make a backup first.