BradPace.com

A few weeks ago my boss Paul Allen gave us the mandate to spend 10% of our work time on our own genealogy.  I had been spending some time already doing my family history but this will be a great reason to get more serious about it.  I already have all 4 of my grandparents lines at least back 5 generations.  Although I don’t have full sources and documentation for it all yet.  I don’t have it all plugged into one family tree file with me as the root person yet.  That is one of my first steps.  But I admit that I have been so busy on my normal work tasks I have been working 50-60 hour weeks just trying to keep up.  And I have not started my 10% time.  Maybe I need to create a task in bugzilla and make it a P1 .

Anyway, this last weekend was General Conference for the LDS church and I thought this would be a perfect time to really dig into the project and start it off on the right foot.  On Sunday morning my dad called and asked if me and my family wanted to travel to Delta (Utah) to visit my grandmother Grace Western Pace.  She is pushing 90, has lived alone in her home since my grandpa died 35 years ago, and has failing eye site.  But is very sharp mentally and is in pretty good health.  I thought this visit would be a great chance to get some family history data and to see what she has available. She is not the genealogist of the family but I was supprized to find she had just stacks compiled family histories.  Pedigree charts,   hundreds of family group charts, photos and historical stories.  Literally  thousands of pages of information.  I think much of the genealogy information I already have and was able to get online (who knows when I find the roadblocks there may be something there I can use).  But the photos and all the stories where great info to find.

Anyway I took my laptop and my scanner to digitize some of the info I found.  My first problem, all the family history pages are those really long ones and they dont fit in my scanner.  Who came up this that crazy size page anyway!  So to get all the info I had to scan every page twice.  What a pain.  It also means that I will have time in photoshop pulling out and stitching together the images.  But I was able to get several hundred pages of information scanned.  She did not offer to let me take any of the information even though no one has looked at it in 20 years.  It’s ok, that gives me a reason to visit her more often.

I also installed FamilyTreeMaker 16 and started my tree consolidation project.  I am doing the same project on familylink.com so that I can compare the 2 systems.  I received a free copy of FTM 16 as a gift so I wanted to give it a try. I have found FTM experience to be very poor.  Too many popup windows and I find it hard to use.  Also everytime I run the program I get a Windows popup that reads “this program has known compatibility issues”.  Because I am running Vista I am sure.  Also I cant even view the pedigree view because I keep getting an error that I dont have a default printer setup.  Very frustrating! I also tried to merge feature to merge in my grandparents trees and I could not get the feature to work at all.  It could never find my grandparent to start the merge.  It also gave no tips as to what info it needs to match up a person in my tree to the uploaded merged tree. FamilyLink.com tree builder does not have any merge functionality.  We need to think about that.

One note is that my first question on the FamilyLink.com family tree was “does it have an export feature?”.  I need to have a way to get the information out of the system if I am going to build my tree there.  It does have an export feature and it seems to work well.  But I had a hard time finding it because it is just called “Gedcom” in the menu.  I need to change this to “Export” or something similar.  Also it would be nice if we could export to all the major family tree formats. I will have to run a usability test on the export functionality on Family Link and promote this feature better.

I think this idea of editing a file locally on your PC, then importing it to an online system to share it and edit it online, then exporting it so it can be edited back on the PC is interesting.  I would like to do more research to understand better if genealogists typically do this type of thing.