Steve’s Genealogy Blog

In my effort to learn more about the various genealogy software packages currently on the market, I attended Geoff Rasmussen’s lecture “Overview of Legacy Family Tree 7″ at the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree 2008.

Geoff Rasmussen at the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree 2008

SOURCE: Geoff Rasmussen at the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree 2008 (Burbank, Los Angeles Co., California). Photographed by Stephen J. Danko on 27 Jun 2008.

The lecture I attended was a basic introduction to Legacy Family Tree 2008 and included discussions of older features, features new to version 7, and features to be added in the future.

As with many other genealogy programs, Legacy Family Tree can calculate relationships between people in the database. However, Legacy can calculate non-blood relationships and additional relationships if two people are related in two or more ways. Legacy can also set bookmarks for specific individuals that appear as tabs at the bottom of the screen.

Legacy can check the entire database for errors in place names. Specifically, the USA County Verifier will check to see if the county included in a place name is correct for the time period.

The main screen of Legacy includes events of birth, christening, death, and burial, allowing the user to quickly enter christening and burial information at the same time the user adds birth and death information.

Legacy’s privacy settings allow the user to mark entries as private or as invisible on reports and exports.

The new Source Writer in Legacy will create source citations according to the standards in Elizabeth Shown Mills’ book Evidence Explained by guiding the user through a series of questions. Sources can be formatted as footnotes, endnotes, or bibliographies and are automatically created as the user types. Subsequent citations of a previously cited source are also properly created. Geoff explained that Legacy will be adding a utility to help the user convert existing source formats to current standards.

Legacy provides research guidance, suggesting sources for given events. The user can click “plan to search’ to add a source to the “to do” list.

For mapping locations, Legacy uses Microsoft Virtual Earth, allowing the user to see locations in a variety of views, including a “bird’s eye” view.

Legacy Family Tree can produce many types of books on the user’s desktop, and can include both maiden and married names in the index.

Legacy includes many charts including many new to version 7. Geoff mentioned DNA charts and “Males Only” charts as examples. In the charts, the user can move boxes around and add backgrounds. Printouts of charts can be ordered directly from within the program.

Geoff presented a second lecture on Saturday entitled “Legacy Family Tree: Why Even Professionals Use It”. Unfortunately, I was not able to hear his second lecture because it conflicted with another lecture I wanted to attend.

At present, I have not tried Legacy Family Tree 7. While Legacy offers a free version of its software, the free version does not include many of the features I would like to try out, including the new Source Writer, Wall Charts, and Mapping utilities.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen J. Danko

One of my objectives at this year’s Southern California Genealogy Jamboree was to learn more about the various genealogy software packages on the market.

Bruce Buzbee, the founder and president of RootsMagic, Inc. and the author of the RootsMagic genealogy software, presented a lecture on “What’s New in RootsMagic 4″.

Bruce Buzbee at the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree 2008

SOURCE: Bruce Buzbee at the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree 2008 (Burbank, Los Angeles Co., California). Photographed by Stephen J. Danko on 27 Jun 2008.

Bruce told the audience that RootsMagic version 4 would be ready to release later this year and, before release, there will be a public beta version of the program. RootsMagic 4 will be the biggest upgrade ever.

Because RootsMagic 4 is not yet ready, Bruce was cautious about discussing new features. He did, however, show how RootsMagic would interface with New FamilySearch. After users sign into New FamilySearch, they will be able to transfer information, including sources, back and forth between RootsMagic 4 and New FamilySearch.

Bruce also demonstrated several features already available in the current release of RootsMagic.

RootsMagic can import GEDCOM files, Family Origins database files, Family Origins backup files, PAF database files, and Family Tree Maker database files. One caveat, however, is that RootsMagic cannot directly import Family Tree Maker 2008 files.

The current version of RootsMagic can produce wall charts, lets the users move boxes to their preferred positions, edit text directly within in the boxes, set background pictures, and add pictures to individual boxes. Users can also print color wall charts up to 42 inches wide by up to 100 feet long through http://www.printmychart.com at prices much lower than those at local copy centers. Bruce demonstrated how to create custom charts in RootsMagic by cutting and pasting between charts.

RootsMagic’s Source Wizard guides the user step-by-step through the process of creating sources, a clear benefit to all users, even those with extensive experience in citing sources. Bruce explained that the source citations created by RootsMagic 3 conform to accepted standards.

Other features Bruce discussed include the ability to merge duplicate place names and the ability to universally correct place names for the entire database at once.

RootsMagic also interfaces with Microsoft Virtual Earth, enabling the user to use an online map to visualize places listed in the user’s database.

Later that same day, I stopped by the RootsMagic booth to meet Bruce. He gladly answered my questions and provided some additional insight into the workings of RootsMagic. Before I left the booth, I picked up a copy of RootsMagic 3 so I could see the program’s functionality for myself.

And, tonight, I installed RootsMagic 3 on my home computer.

At home, I use a SONY Vaio laptop with Intel Centrino Duo processor running Windows Vista. I was quite surprised at how quickly and effortlessly the installation was completed. I registered the software online and upgraded to the latest release, version 3.26.

Since I currently use Family Tree Maker 2008, I had to export my database of 10,000 individuals to a GEDCOM before importing into RootsMagic 3. By exporting to GEDCOM, I lost the images I had associated with my Family Tree Maker file, but I wasn’t particular concerned since I didn’t have many images, anyway. I imported the GEDCOM into RootsMagic, a process that took very little time at all.

I was finally ready to view my data. I thought that, with the relatively small size of the application, I might be disappointed with the functionality of the program. I couldn’t have been more wrong. RootsMagic is a full-featured application with a remarkably easy learning curve. I had no problem coming up to speed with RootsMagic in just a few minutes. RootsMagic comes with a video tutorial, and I’ll be sure to view it, but I didn’t need to watch the video or consult the manual in order to start working with RootsMagic.

The number and variety of reports is impressive as is the appearance of the reports. However, I almost immediately noticed that, in the Register Report, occupations were sometimes reported as places, and several facts were reported as “[need to define sentence]”. Happily, RootsMagic allows me to write my own sentence formats to report facts. This will certainly be a time saver since I currently spend an inordinate amount of time tweaking the wording in my reports.

Well, I’m very pleasantly surprised by my initial experience with RootsMagic 3 and, although I like Family Tree Maker 2008, the reporting and publishing capabilities of RootsMagic are tempting me to switch to RootsMagic as my primary genealogy database. Now, I can’t wait to see RootsMagic 4!

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen J. Danko

My friend and occasional guest-blogger, Barbara Poole, recently told me about her success in using Google Alerts to find new obituaries. Up until now, I haven’t used Google Alerts.

After receiving Barbara’s message, I signed up for a few Google Alerts. One was for “Nienadowa”, the Polish village of my paternal ancestors. The first alert I received was for Nienadowa, Przemysl, Poland, populated place.

This link brought me to GeoNames.org.

To my delight, the link provided information on the location of Nienadowa, including the altitude (271 m), the latitude, and the longitude (N 49° 50′ 0′’ E 22° 26′ 0′’ or, in digital form, 49.83333 / 22.43333): 

The Polish Village of Nienadowa, Poland on GeoNames

Now, using such genealogy databases as Legacy Family Tree, The Master Genealogist, and RootsMagic, I can include the coordinates for Nienadowa, providing an unambiguous location for the village of my ancestors.

Unambiguous location data is important for common place names. One can usually narrow down a place with a common name if additional information is provided (such as the name of the county and state for United States place names), but I think it’s great that, even if the administrative divisions of a place change over the years, the latitude and longitude stay the same.

The GeoNames service also provides alternate spellings for the place name, if appropriate.

A case in point is the Lithuanian village of Butrimonys that I visited in October. Butrymonys is the location of the parish church that my maternal grandmother’s family attended.

Butrimonys ca. 125 m
Butrimance, Butrimantsi, Butrimantsy, Butrimonis, Butrimonių,
Butrimonys (English), Butrymańce, Бутримонис  (Russian)
populated place
N 54° 30′ 0′’ E 24° 15′ 0′’
54.5 / 24.25
GeoNameId : 600213

This location is distinct from another village of the same name just a short distance away at N 54° 15′ 0′’ E 25° 9′ 0′’ (54.25 / 25.15). Without the exact coordinates, one might not be certain which of these two villages is the correct one. Both are located in the Dzūkija region of Lithuania.

The plethora of alternate spellings provided includes Polish, English, and Russian spellings, all very useful when reading historical maps and documents. In particular, my great aunt used the spelling Butrymańce on documents she filled out in the United States, something that confused me until I realized that it was the Polish spelling of Butrimonys.

I’ll be adding a few more Google Alerts in the weeks to come.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen J. Danko

I’ve used Family Tree Maker to organize my genealogy research ever since I started seriously researching my family history. I’ve upgraded every time a new version was available and have been happy with each upgrade except for the time the developers decided to remove the ability to search Genealogy.com from inside the application.

Installing Family Tree Maker 2008 

On Saturday I installed Family Tree Maker 2008, knowing full well that others were reporting problems with installing FTM2008, importing FTM files from previous versions, and working with the new interface.

My computer is a 5-year-old Toshiba Satellite laptop with a Pentium 4 CPU running at 1.60 GHz and 512 MB RAM. The operating system is Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition. I upgraded from FTM16 to FTM2008.

Installation of FTM2008 went smoothly, although it took 1 hour to complete. Importing my family file took 1/2 hour but, again, everything went smoothly. I imported all 9293 individuals, 3290 families, 2604 sources, 15187 records, and 254 multimedia files with 0 errors.

Using Family Tree Maker 2008 

While the installation and import took some time, now that everything is installed and imported, the application launches within 2 minutes (about the same amount of time it takes for Microsoft Word 2002 to launch on my system and much less than the 3 1/2 minutes it takes for Adobe Photoshop CS2 to launch).

As other people reported, I noticed that the FTM2008 runs a bit sluggishly, which is probably the fault of my somewhat outdated computer. FTM2008 doesn’t currently include a facility to produce a book from the desktop, a Register Report (descendant narrative), or an Ahnentafel Report (ancestor narrative), three of the features I’ve used most often in Family Tree Maker 16.

Performance Update to Family Tree Maker 2008

On Thursday night, I received notification that FTM had issued a program update (Service Pack 1) to address performance-related issues. I installed that free update immediately. Service Pack 1 includes the following updates:

• Name parsing fixes
• Place auto-completion enhancements
• File merge updates (including better indication of status)
• Updates to publishing (including saved settings)
• Resolution of issues pertaining to import of The Master Genealogist files
• Performance and stability enhancements

Reports Update to Family Tree Maker 2008

On Friday, I received notification by e-mail that FTM is planning to issue two more free updates.

The next update will be released in mid-October when the publishing capabilities will be expanded. This update will return several popular reports to FTM2008.

Desktop Book Publishing Update to Family Tree Maker 2008

The third currently scheduled update will be made next summer and will offer a desktop book publishing tool, the absence of which in FTM2008 has generated considerable online discussion. In addition, enhancements will be introduced to better integrate FTM and Ancestry Press.

Together, these enhancements will allow users the choice of generating and printing a book on the user’s desktop, generating a PDF on the user’s desktop and allowing the user to publish the book using a third party publishing facility, and generating and publishing a book using Ancestry Press.

Ancestry has also clarified some concerns about Ancestry Press. Any information uploaded to create a book on Ancestry Press remains private unless the user chooses to share it with specific individuals or the community.

In October, registered users of FTM2008 will receive a coupon for 50% off their first professionally published book through Ancestry Press.

Closing Comments

In general, I like FTM2008. I particularly like the integration of FTM 2008 with Ancestry.com, since Ancestry is my main source of online genealogy data and images. In the short time I’ve used FTM2008, I’ve already found quite a bit of relevant information about people in my tree that I missed in the past.

I’m pleased to see that the folks at Family Tree Maker are listening to user comments and are quickly addressing those issues.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen J. Danko