Genealogy restarted

[johnridley]

Thanks to kevinnickerson for pointing out the free PAF software. I'll certainly be buying the extra graphing addon, for $7 it does nicer graphs than FTM.

I loaded the software up today and started doing data entry, keeping only to the parts of the tree that I'm sure are reasonably accurate. I'm not done with that part yet, but I've got 331 individuals in so far and I've still got a fair chunk of relatively direct family. I have cites on a fairly small number, but I plan to do a bunch of printing of parts and mailing them around to a few people for verification.

Comments

[mbcrui.livejournal.com]

We printed out the whole thing, put it in a binder, and took it to my great-uncles birthday party. Andy's still doing updates because we also included a card with an email address, and now all the relatives send up info when there's a new baby or marriage or whatever.

It was very helpful... especially to have my great-aunt and great-uncle go thru and tag incorrect information.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I did that a few years ago at a family reunion. I had to limit it to just that branch of the family, to make it reasonable. The full data set that I have has 3800 individuals, and even then I had to just start saying "no, this is too much" and stop when I got to 10th removed cousins, etc. And I'm not sure of the data in many cases.

Honestly, at this point my brother has grandkids that I don't even know their names, they've just turned into a swarm to me. I don't get there enough to know what's going on, my only news source is my mom, and I can't keep her talking about the same thing for 30 seconds straight.

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can't much see why anyone would buy FTM when PAF is free. I can't think what I'd want done that it doesn't do. (BTW, I have the graphing disc) Well, one thing. I have a CD or two I bought from FTM with scans of books. Nothing else will read them. In theory the data on the disk is just CCITT FAX format files, but they're not quite right. I should make another stab at it some day.

Learning to use the citations screen took some bother. I have a book on it somewhere, but it wasn't as sensible as I'd have liked. The big thing is deciding on a few top level items and using the sub-stuff for individual cites.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

You know the answer as well as I do. It's because people think that to get software you go to the store and buy it.

The vast majority of home users could just grab a copy of OpenOffice too, but they continue to buy MS Office. I'm not as solidly in the "OO will do anything" camp as I once was - any amount of trying to make OO Impress act like a usable Powerpoint replacement will quickly dispel that notion, but for most people who just need a word processor and maybe a simple spreadsheet, MS Office is a total waste.

I've got something like 100 FTM CDs at home, but I think most of them are just data sets and should be usable outside of FTM. If not, well, I have FTM 2006 and a virtual machine.