James Tanner's Blog – April 2010 Archive (29)

My earliest attempts to use computers for genealogy began with an Apple

II with a primitive program that was entirely text based and used a dot

matrix printer with fan-fold paper. I remember that I ended up

re-entering my entire file a number of times either due to data crashes

or to incompatible upgrades. The amount of information about each

individual and family was minimal, but the promise of organization and

convenience was worth the effort to keep entering… Continue

A few days ago, I had a patron at the Mesa Regional Family History

Center ask me about a problem she was having with New FamilySearch.

She had a huge pile of printouts from her Personal Ancestral File

program and was methodically going through each one and comparing the

information to that found in New FamilySearch. She was… Continue

Fast work and an immediate response from the staff at GenealogyWise

seems to have stemmed the tide of spam for the time being. Thanks to

their rapid response, the issue was resolved by having the blog posts

reviewed before going online. I might suggest that given some time,

there could be a way to automate that procedure by having a holding file

where the titles and text could be reviewed more rapidly. It… Continue

GenealogyWise is a really

dynamic and useful social networking site for genealogists.

GenealogyWise is part of FamilyLink which if you keep tracing back

through links, is basically Paul Allen and his staff who also run

WorldVitalRecords and a lot more. Many of the members post all or part

of their own blogs on the GenealogyWise blog posts. Lately, the blog

posts coming through Google Reader have been hijacked by spam drug

sellers. My… Continue

I guess the first thing I have learned is that there are a lot more

blogs than I have time to read. I keep finding new ones all the time and

get more and more amazed at the tremendous variety of genealogical

experiences. I have learned that blogging is takes the place of the old

home town newspaper on an international scale. The posts give you

insight into people's lives all over the world. Today's report on Google

Analytics shows my posts being read in 39… Continue

It has now been a number of months since I junked my PC and went back to

working almost exclusively on an Apple Macintosh iMac. I say

that my work is almost exclusive because I still own a PC Laptop from

HP. I use the laptop to run my scanning station. I mentioned from time

to time that I am running a program called Parallels Desktop. I have worked on

literally… Continue

With a lot of help from Luc Comeau at Millenia with Legacy Family Tree, I

finally got the program up and running with New FamilySearch. I

will work on RootsMagic

next,… Continue

New FamilySearch

(NFS)

has just completed a major change in its Application Programming

Interface or API.

Because of this change all of the programs that connect to NFS were

required to upgrade to adapt to the changes. All… Continue

Once or twice a month I teach a class on Google for Genealogy. At the

beginning of each section, I always ask the class members about their

previous experience with various Google features including Google Maps,

Google Books, Google News, Blogs and many other apps and features. In

many cases, my questions draw a complete blank. No one in the class has

ever tried or even knew about the feature or function. This is

interesting because almost every person in every… Continue