Choosing A Family History Program - Lincoln Hills Genealogy · PDF fileChoosing A Family History Program Presented by Bob Ringo 3/5/2014 SCLHGC Boot Camp 2014 1 My Family Tree Definition

Choosing A Family History Program

Presented by Bob Ringo

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My Family Tree

Definition of Genealogy

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Genealogy is the study of a person’s family, its origins, and the progression from one generation to the next.

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Genealogy is a hobby in which the first genealogist wishes to share everything he/she collects with other genealogists, and wants other genealogists to share everything they collect with him/her.

“share and share alike”

Why Genealogy?

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Prove Family Stories

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Show Relationships to Famous People

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Find Ancestor’s Involvement in Historic Event(s)

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Trace Family History of Medical Conditions

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Prove Family Connections For Inheritance

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Find Birth Parent(s)

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Satisfy Religious Tenets

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Qualify for a Heritage Society

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Membership in an Indian Tribe

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Connect With Living Relatives

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Pass Family Legacy to Future Generations

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Major Steps In Genealogy

Collect

Organize

Publish

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You Start With Yourself

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Research for ancestors begins with what you know now. And you should know yourself better than anyone.

Family Interviews

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Begin Searching

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Organize

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Popular Family History Programs

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Ancestry.com

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Publish

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Genealogy Hardware

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Genealogy Software

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Choosing Family History Software

• THE FUNDAMENTAL REQUIREMENTS FOR CHOOSING family history software are as follows. Your family history program should allow you to record all of the data that you discover during your research, including conflicting data for the same event, and you should be able to document where each piece of information that you record was obtained.

• The key features of a good family history program are the following:

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Data Integrity

• Your family history program should not create data. If your program adds data such as a ‘married name,’ you, the user, should have control over the process.

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Data Recording--Names

• Your family history program should provide adequate space and fields for recording names and there should be a means to record all name variants a person might use in his/her lifetime.

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Data Recording--Dates

• Your family history program should accept all standard date entries and you should be able to choose the form in which the dates are displayed in your program.

• Your family history program should allow a ‘sort date’ or other means to control the sorting of data in its program views and reports.

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Data Recording--Places

• Your family history program should allow adequate space to record place names.

• Your family history program should provide the capability for entering a beginning and an ending date for each place.

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Data Recording—Events and Facts

• Family history programs have evolved to storing each event or fact in a person’s life in a discrete ‘tag’ structure as opposed to using a fill-in-the-blank approach.

• Each tag should have at least seven fields — event name (such as birth, death, occupation, census, etc.), date, place, source, multimedia, notes, and roles.

• Tags have the enormous advantage that all of the frequently encountered conflicting data in your genealogical research can be recorded.

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Data Recording--Roles

• Many events in your database will have more than one participant. Your family history program should have tools to link all of those persons to that event and to allow each person a differing role that can be output to narrative reports.

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Multiple Parents

• Your family history program should allow linking a child not only to its natural parents but also to its adopted parents and handling other non-traditional relationships.

• Your family history program should be able to handle marriages between two males or two females.

• Your family history program should be able to handle “significant others.”

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Multimedia

• Your family history program should provide the capability for linking multimedia objects (photos, sound, video) to individuals and to events and, then, be able to incorporate these objects into reports.

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Source Documentation

You need the capability to record the source of any information that you enter into your database to provide substantiation for your research and to be able to tell other researchers where they can locate the data that you are reporting.

Your family history program should include the ability to record citation detail that links an event to its source and also to record the repository from which the source was obtained.

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Evidence Evaluation (Surety)

• A provision should exist to enter a surety value so that you can record your judgment about the validity of any data that you enter.

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Searching & Sorting / Filters / Flags

• Your family history program should provide the tools you need to quickly and easily find individuals, places, dates, events, and sources in your database and, then, to designate subsets of your data for exporting and for printing.

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Research Log

• Your family history program should give you the ability to record tasks as you discover what needs to be done as well as to print a useful report to aid your next trip to a repository.

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Data Import

• Some family history programs provide direct import from the databases produced by other software packages (e. g., TMG--GenBridge).

• However, every major family history program supports GEDCOM version 5.5 (GEnealogical Data COMmunication), a standard developed by the Family History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) to facilitate exchanging computerized genealogical data.

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Data Export

• GEDCOM data transfer is somewhat limited to only data that fits the specification. Since the higher-end family history programs can record data for which no explicit provision is made in the GEDCOM standard, there may be limits as to how much of the data that you record in one program that can be transferred to another via GEDCOM.

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Report Output

• To aid your research, you sometimes need to be able to produce lists of a subset of people or events as defined by a filter.

• When you contact a new relative, you want to be able to provide him/her with a concise and readable reports such as a pedigree or compact descendant chart to show where you are in researching your family.

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Report Output (2)

• On the other end of the spectrum, you need report writing tools to produce the family history that you have been developing. This includes creating a readable narrative report with a table of contents, footnotes or endnotes, a bibliography, and one or more indexes.

• Your report should be exportable in a format acceptable to the word processor of your choice for final editing. If you include graphical images, the report should also include links to the external image files inserted into their proper places in the text.

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Linking to Your Word Processor

• Your family history program should permit you to import text developed in your word processor.

• RootsMagic is the only program that I am aware of that currently includes this function.

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Potential Problems Report

• Your family history program should allow you to check for common database errors—death before birth, birth after mother’s death, death after 150 years, and the like.

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LDS Support

• Your family history program should contain complete LDS support. This support includes fields for all ordinance dates and temples, special date codes, temple list, ordinance reports, and TempleReady® submission files.

• Source documentation for LDS ordinance information is also a must.

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FamilySearch Family Tree Interface

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Website Creation

• Your family history program should generate output into HTML formatted files as well as possess aids for web page creation.

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GEOCODING

Your family history program should allow for geocoding places.

Geocoding is the process of assigning geographic identifiers (e.g., codes or geographic coordinates expressed as

latitude-longitude) to map .

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Unicode Support Is Desirable • So what is Unicode? Basically Unicode support means that

your family history program isn’t limited to just “western European” languages. RootsMagic 4 can handle Polish, Cyrillic, Kanji, and any other language you can throw at it.

• And while most of us don’t use these other languages every day, there are times when we may want to enter the name of an ancestor in his native language, or keep a transcription of an old document in its original language.

• If you would like to learn more than you could ever possibly want to know about Unicode, check out this Wikipedia article.

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DNA Testing

• Your family history program should allow you to enter the results of DNA testing.

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RootsMagic-To-G0

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FTM TreeSync

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FTM Tutorials

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Family Tree Maker Tutorials

Legacy Training Videos

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Legacy Training Videos

RootsMagic Webinars

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RootsMagic Webinars

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Buy Family Tree Maker 2014

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Buy Legacy Family Tree

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Buy RootsMagic

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