Paul Milner Speaks at DGS Spring Seminar
Paul Milner was the speaker for the Dallas Genealogical Society's Spring Seminar--"From Whence They Came" about research in the British Isles. As I have yet to get out of the US on the lines that I'm researching, I wasn't expecting major revelations. Boy was I wrong. Of the four sessions he led, the second was on migration history from Ireland to the US, and where people entered during each period. This hour really changed the research approach that I will take for the major line that we are pursueing.
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- Written by Bruce Moore
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Visit to Midwest Genealogy Center in Independence, MO
On the way back from visiting relatives at Christmas, we stopped at the Midwest Genealogy Center, a part of the Mid-Continent Public Library in Independence, Missouri. The library had a booth at the FGS/RootsTech conference and was on the way so we planned to arrive at 6:00 PM and spend an evening seeing what was there before proceeding with the rest of our drive the next day. We ended up spending the evening and all of the next day at the library--the collection is quite good and we both found much good material.
The library specializes in the mid-west; I found a shelf on each of the counties in Illinois and Indianna in which I'm interested. They have all of the major online resources; I spent several hours working on newspapers that I can't access from home or our local library. It has full sets of training DVDs from several leaders in genealogy education. Given that we make the trek to Minnesota a couple of times a year, we will start making Independence our overnight stop and may start spending a day there to break up the drive.
If we had been paying attention, we could have signed up for a library card while we were there, as that must be done in person.
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Family Tree Maker End of Life
The Dallas Genealogical Society 2015 Awards Banquet on Saturday, December 12th was a fun luncheon held at the downtown Dallas Public Library. During the networking time, there was much discussion of the recent Ancestry.com announcement that it will discontinue support for Family Tree Maker. The general consensus was that there is no need to do anything immediately. During 2016, it is likely that the other desktop software vendors will make updates to improve data import compatibility with FTM.
Although it does not make sense to purchase another software package immediately, there are a few things that are a good idea to start on now:
- Look at your tree and start to clean up any data problems and inconsistencies. This is a good time to look at data issues to identify things that are broken now and will continue to be broken after a conversion:
- People that are unconnected to anyone else in the database.
- Identify death dates that preceed birth dates
- Identify other dates that are impossible or unreasonable
- Identify broken media links that will be broken after a conversion
- Start reading on location name standardization and location name history; once you understand the issues for your region, begin to work on cleaning up and standardizing place names.
- Consider downloading and installing the free version of a couple of packages and test the export from FTM and import into the other package; this will almost certainly identify special characters and corrupt data in your FTM database. It will also give you an idea of what data representations will work in an export and what won’t work.
Whatever you do, don’t update anything in the trial system; only do updates in FTM until you are ready to cut over. You do not want to have updates spread out across all of several different systems.
At some point, we will probably write reviews of some of the tools that we looked at about a year ago:
- Reunion (native OS X)
- Legacy (native Windows or Wine on OS X)
- Roots Magic (native Windows or Wine on OS X)
- GRAMPS (native Windows, OS X or Linux)
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2015 Fall Dallas Genealogical Society Seminar
The Fall 2015 Dallas Genealogical Society (DGS) seminar on October 24 was great; Paul Lacopo was an entertaining speaker and covered a lot of material that was completely different from most of the sessions that I've attended at DGS, FGS and RootsTech. Paul is a retired veteranian; one of his sessions was on how to read death certificates and the names used for various diseases over time. Although talking about the infectious diseases of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries is not all that appealing, it is important to know and understand both from a genealogical perspective and a public health perspective. We don't realize just how far we have come in a short period of time.
The session on social history and social history resources was also very useful for understanding alternative documents to standard birth/death/marraige public records for periods when these records were not kept. He had a couple of fascinating case studies on using social history to untangle a messy duplicate name problem in the 1800s was a wonderful example of genealogy and of story telling.
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