I use Custodian 3(http://www.custodian3.co.uk/) to record all the information I find at distant record offices, which may or may not be relevant to my own family tree, so that I have the information if I find a link at a later date.
Thanks for posting the note about GenSmarts and their reply. I've had some trouble with it also, so when I see the situation you describe I'll double-check what is going on in my FH file.
I've posted about this before in the wish list area, but I am on the lookout for some way to record which addresses are associated with particular source records.
I have a wide variety of sources which will give the street address -- ship manifests (the 'person going to visit' and 'closest relative at home' questions), WWI Draft Registrations, City Directories, and the Census, etc. What I would like to do is build an index of what I have collected so far so that I can say 'what do I have associated in city X with street Y' and pull up all the sources.
I did find the useful article on making a query based on Residence -- I suppose I will have to knuckle down and learn how to write queries. In the meantime, I guess I will build my own 'city directory' with Excel, but I wish there were an easier way to go about it.
Jane said: I am still looking for a good portable contact management system, a research logging system and a "magic brickwall remover" although the latter is somewhat unlikely.
I have also just found a tiny free GedCom Viewer which will work on a key drive called Simple Family Tree
Jane, have you had a chance to try out Simple Family Tree yet?
I've just ordered a 'research pack' from one of the (almost) local genealogy groups, the Silicon Valley Computer Genealogy Group. It comes with a USB drive pre-loaded with the Family History Library's list of links to useful sites (thousands!), and one of the coolest research tools I've ever seen -- Post-It-Note pads (dubbed "Stuck on Sources") -- printed with a little form with Author, Title, Call Number, and so on -- so if you are at the library photocopying stuff out of a book, or printing out stuff at home, you can write down the info for the source and stick it right on the page. Voila!
There's a nice write-up on putting PAF on a flash drive on their site, too: http://www.svpafug.org/.
I have not made any progress towards finding a new research logger (apart from GenSmarts or the one built into Ancestral Quest) or contact management software.
However, I am thinking about getting a (bigger) USB drive for my workplace that is a U3 Smart Drive (see http://www.u3.com/ ) and loading it with OpenOffice and EssentialPIM. I'll let you know how I like the portable EssentialPIM. Certainly the price is right (free).
Jane said in her original post that she was looking for a good research management system. I have been reading several books on managing one's research and wondering why we have so few family tree programs, yet so few research management tools.
Today I got an email newsletter from the US magazine Family Tree Newsletter which had a software review. From there I investigated other links, ended up back at Cyndi's list -- you get the idea.
Looking at the screenshots, it seems that this program is the kind of thing I have been looking for.
However, it is for the Mac.
I do have a Mac, but not an Intel one. The advantage for me in using GenScribe would be that I could work on my research tasks while my husband is using the Windows computer. The disadvantage, of course, is that while he is on the Windows computer, I cannot refer to my data on Fanily Historian.
If anyone sees anything like this for Windows, I'd appreciate hearing about it -- at some point I will get a new machine which will be able to run both FH and some flavor of research manager at the same time.
For anyone interested, Bygones is a free genealogical notekeeping tool based on a database, the details of which can be found at http://home.utah-inter.net/bygones/
In relation to other genealogy software, I don't believe you can go past GED-GEN, http://www.ged-gen.com/ for a static GEDCOM to HTML converter. I use it to generate my site found at the link below (excluding the homepage).
On the subject of other software, and in particular something more research oriented, I ran into Deltadrive Genealogy Research System (GRS) www.deltadrive.co.uk.
Had a quick look at the Family History Fair but as it has no demo haven't invested in a copy.
I saw Deltadrive at Bracknell, too, and in a moment of madness invested in a copy. I can't honestly say that I have explored every facet, mainly because life is too short to learn to use this program properly! Unfortunately, like many "research oriented" programs it tries to do much more than be a relatively simple research aid (which is what I want). The idea is that it is "document based" rather than "person based". To quote from the reference manual:
"GRS is made up of three main components: Information Tools Research Data Family Knowledge These are used to collect information, store it in a logical and searchable way (data) and to help you make assumptions and decisions to produce family trees (knowledge)"
This appears to mean that you capture information from different sources into documents in a research database. A document can be a BMD certificate, census, GEDCOM file, or practically anything you can think of. Within each document people are linked by relationships. You can then analyse this research information in a number of ways (most of which I think you could replicate in FH). When you are convinced that the people in various documents are members of your family tree you would transfer the information into the "Family Knowledge" part of the database and link the people in different documents together with standard relationships. You can then export the information to a GEDCOM file.
At the moment, I can't honestly see me investing the time and effort to learn to use the program as I'm not sure whether I could adapt my existing system structure to work with it without re-formatting or re-entering a lot of data.
Thanks for the reply - I invested my money in Family Atlas which although not cheap has a clear function in allowing mapping of data in the gedcom file.
I was worried that GRS would mean throwing away a lot of work and effectively starting again with the new tool which seems to be database driven.
If you do get further with it please post - I think what I need is a companion tool not a replacement for FH!
One of the books I have in my library is Emily Croom's Unpuzzling Your Past http://www.unpuzzling.com/ and its companion workbook with handy forms which can be removed and photocopied. Other log forms are available from websites, other books, etc.
What I don't understand is, these forms exist, and the research logging that needs to be done is clearly understood, so why does everyone seize on the lineage-linked database idea and force even document-oriented programs to include it? Why force people to assign their finds to a specific person when the whole point is, you may not know yet whether the document you've found relates to your known relative, or not?
It is tempting to take Emily Croom's forms and use them as a model to design some Excel spreadsheets (along the lines of the Census Tools spreadsheets) http://censustools.com/ to log what I have collected. I don't understand why there aren't more simple journaling programs out there -- of course I could set up a Wiki or blog on my local machine, but that seems like overkill. I agree with PatrickT - I want something simple.
Just wanted to add a brief note (well, what counts for 'brief' with yours truly) that GenSmarts 2.0 has some experimental features in what they call the 'sandbox' that will allow you to log and categorize resources in your own library and then it will alert you when you have people in your file in the same time and place as those sources -- see the thread on the forum here about keeping track of what one has on cover discs.
Now I have to figure out how to correctly identify these digital record collections to GenSmarts -- unfortunately there is no description of what is on the cover disc which is easy to scrape off the magazine's website.
WinMerge is an Open Source (GPL) visual text file differencing and merging tool for Windows. It is highly useful for determining what has changed between project versions, and then merging changes between versions.
Not so much for the merging part, but to make comparisons?
The thing I find particularly appealing is the highlighting of the differences between the files.
I haven't yet checked the wishlist to see if that feature has been asked for in FH's own Merge/Compare functions so if it is there already, please be gentle....
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What other software do you use for Family History?
