The other program I use that I would recommend to people is GenSmarts, which reads your GEDCOM file and looks for missing data, makes suggestions about what you might do to fill in the gaps and suggests places where that information might be found. It will sort your suggestions by Research Location and print out a To Do list for you if you are visiting a specific facility.
There is also an interesting little ad-supported program called Ahnensuche which is useful for gathering pointers to information on Family Search and GenCircles and other places. It allows you to sort out the search hits by category: 'important' 'perhaps important' 'not important'. It could be of some use in keeping track what you have searched for already.
Besides those two, I will use anything I can get my hands on. Before I settled on FH as my main program, I tried all the other programs I could find, and for the programs which still work (where the trials haven't exipired), I will use them for the odd feature here and there.
Ancestral Quest has a very handy date calculator, and it will display some scans we made which even IrfanView has trouble with, so I'm still using that for the scrapbook and for some features like the date calculator. It does have a Research Manager, although I didn't use it much before I switched over to FH for my main program.
I downloaded the trial of version 11 which allows one to have a database of up to 120 people - don't know if the current trial is as friendly, or if it cuts off after a certain amount of time.
I bought FTM for the free sub to Ancestry (a year with that version), and every now and again I will forget how awful it is and fire it up to do a web search. Every now and again I do find something that way which I missed on a manual search, so I haven't tossed it yet.
I bought a very cheap closeout copy of Family Tree Legends because it came bundled with GedStarPro (and Pocket Genealogist) -- compared to FH, FTL (the 2006 version) is awful, and I can't get the SmartMatching on GenCircles to work, but it has a nice feature that will let you print out various blank forms designed by the US magazine Family Tree Magazine. Since I have tons of notes in my FH database which lead to ugly reports, I may print forms out and fill them in my hand as one did in the old 'typewriter genealogy' days.
Since I mostly bought the package to play with GedStarPro on my old Palm, it didn't really matter to me if FTL worked or not -- so a form generator for $8 is not bad, I guess.
I've also used GedXLate, have looked at the set of Excel spreadsheets known as Census tools, etc.
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 too am looking for some kind of PIM or contact management software.
For the 'magic brickwall remover' -- GemSmarts is good, but a kind soul looking over your problem with a fresh eye is better. I like the website Curious Fox for posting geographically based queries -- a couple of users have provided information that was quite helpful.
Jan
