New software

Well, I'm back. Finally I have something to write about! Okay, so seriously, I have tons of things to write about, I'd just hit a kind of doldrums.

Anyway, I broke down and bought Ancestry's "Family Tree Maker" family history software a couple of weeks ago, and it got here this past week. I've been having fun playing with it (although at first it was a little frustrating, and I still have some questions). It's so much more "elegant" than the old version of Personal Ancestral File that I'd had for several years. Plus it interacts automatically online with Ancestry.com, and that's a huge bonus since I have an Ancestry membership.

The software promised that you could transfer files from a number of other family history programs, including PAF (Personal Ancestral File), which was one of the selling points for me. I definitely didn't want to have to go back and manually enter almost 1500 individual records, including notes and sources. But when I tried to do the file transfer straight across, which the FTM (Family Tree Maker) program was prompting me to do, FTM would crash and tell me I had to restart. I tried oh, so many times to make it work, and even searched online for answers, but couldn't find what I needed. In desperation I finally decided I would have to make a GEDCOM file out of the PAF file, which I knew would at least contain all the basic name-birth-death sort of data, and load it into FTM that way. I could manually transfer the notes and sources by cut-and-paste later.

Blessedly, when I used the GEDCOM file, it worked, and not only was the fact information intact, but the notes and sources showed up, as well! Hallelujah! Now, FTM is different enough from PAF that I still haven't really figured out where the sources are attached to the individual files (the notes are obvious on the person's page). And the photo links I'd attached to the PAF files didn't make it over, so I'm having to manually insert those, but in all actuality, this has been a blessing. In PAF, you had to attach the photo to each individual person who was in it -- i.e., if you had four people in one photo, you had to go into each person's file and add the photo, so that was one photo, four times. But in FTM, you load the photo, and then attach the people to it (like tagging in Facebook), so you only have to do the photo once and just pick the people from the list. Super easy.

Another cool thing about FTM is the way it links directly to my Ancestry.com tree. When I select the "family" (i.e. pedigree) view in FTM, if I have an internet connection, it will show me any "hints" it has for my tree members. A "hint" in Ancestry is a link to a possible source or other tree containing information about that individual, i.e. census records, birth records, entries in One World Tree, etc. I can look at each hint to see if it does, indeed, go with that person, and if it does, then I can choose to merge it into my FTM tree. And that's cool because it will attach the actual image, if there is one (like a census image) to the FTM file for that person! Which means I don't have to go through all my hundreds of census images and manually attach them to the people they go to. Yay!

The only negative thing about this is that the "hints" feature doesn't always find every record for that person, even if I have the records attached to their information on my Ancestry tree. So I might have the 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900 and 1910 census files, plus a death record attached to a person on my Ancestry tree, but the "hints" feature has only pulled the 1860 and 1870 census records for my FTM tree. Which means having to do another time-wasting lookup on that person through FTM to attach it to the FTM tree. It may be that there is a way to transfer all that information directly and I just don't know about it yet. Of course, I probably could have transferred my tree file from Ancestry instead of PAF, but I had more notes in the PAF version, so I wanted to go with it.

So, I've been having fun merging census records and such, and adding photos. Oh! FTM has another awesome feature that will show you where on a map (through Bing maps) your ancestors lived, and if you have their census records or other migration-revealing info, it will show you their paths of migration! I think that's pretty awesome. I plugged in all the places I've lived in my life, and it looked like a little kid's messed-up yarn ladder, with one very long spike off to London and back! lol

I really think this software is going to be much more useful than the PAF program I had been using, mainly because I won't have to do so much manual adding of records when I find something new. Plus, being plugged into Ancestry I could make a book or poster or something like that if I ever get things together enough to do that.

Well, this turned out sounding like a review of Family Tree Maker, which wasn't really what I intended it to be, but I do like the software so far, even with the minor inconveniences, which may be just because I haven't taken the time to explore the tutorials.

Next time I promise to be more interesting! ;-)