It's A Mess

It's A Mess

When computers fail, when you use more than one genealogy program, or you change from one genealogy program to another, It's A Mess.  I'm going to write at least two posts of my observations concerning some of the issues and problems I must deal with if I'm going to continue to record new genealogy information and if I want to be able to take advantage of the latest technology for sharing on the Internet.

My Genealogy Programs

I have two working computers, an old desktop with some issues and a relatively new Toshiba laptop. 

On the desktop computer I have three genealogy programs installed: 

1. Personal Ancestral File (PAF) version 2.31 a DOS genealogy program which I run in a Window
2. RootsMagic version 3 which I used to convert some of my files to the RootsMagic format and to create some new files
3. Personal Ancestral File (PAF) for Windows (version 5.2 I think) which I used for experimentation.

On the new laptop I have RootsMagic version 5 installed. I'm using this program to learn about the features of this version and to experiment with moving my files from the desktop to the laptop computer. I was never proficient with version 3. I'm aware that I continue to fall further behind and that the latest version of RootsMagic is version 6.

I own a copy of the book Getting The Most Out of RootsMagic version 4 even though I've never owned that version of the program. I've found the book to be quite helpful.

The LDS church has announced that as of July 15, 2013 they will discontinue support and downloads of Personal Ancestral File. Something tells me it might be useful to download and install their program one last time before the program is no longer available.

Dick Henthorn

27 June 2013