Janet's Genealogy Blog

MacFamilyTree 4 Charts Dazzle

These are my grandparents on my Mom's side and their parents. I was happily using Reunion 8 to track my family tree until I got a look at the beautiful charts that MacFamilyTree 4 produces. Wow!

Besides this kind of charting, you get instant web pages. If you have web space somewhere including .Mac, you can get your data up on the web fast! Here's my first attempt. Each person's name can be clicked to zoom into their information in detail like this 50% screen shot:

MacFamilyTree 4 feels like a young program. In fact it is. It's been built from scratch for the Mac OS X platform. It uses all the built-in capabilities of X like image resizing. There's a little slider that lets you view charts at any size with instantaneous and smooth expansion and contraction as you move the slider.

Being young, it has its moments but also has rough spots here and there. I'm guessing that you can learn your way around the rough spots and do great with it - and it's only $45. I recommend that you pop open the help right away because they give you a few getting started tips that will help you avoid a couple of the rough spots.

Right now this is the *fun* genealogy program and Reunion 8 is the *serious* genealogy program for Mac. I'll be using both for a while because fun is a priority for me. MacFamilyTree uses the GED 5.5 format rather than a proprietary data format. There may be some limitations to that, but it's also nice to know that everything you do in the program can be exported to GED format. Reunion 8 can export to GED as well but since that format isn't it's native format, you can't be sure everything will be exported.

I've entered about 40 records into MacFamilyTree and I must say that it's faster to enter into Reunion 8. But then, part of that is that I'm used to Reunion. And part is that Reunion has a few more data entry aids. It might make sense for me to enter data into Reunion and then export it periodically into MacFamilyTree when I want to print charts or post an updated family tree to my website.

Introducing Janet's Genealogy Blog

Hello there. Welcome to my genealogy den! I've just recently acquired the genealogy bug after a brief flirtation eight years ago. I'm really into it. This isn't my first blog - it's my fourth. Maybe you've seen my Tech Ronin blog.

This whole new bout of genealogy passion started shortly after I bought my Zire 72 in May. I was looking around for cool software to put on my Zire and found a little program called MyRoots. I promptly downloaded the demo, tried it and then bought the full version. I have never had my genealogy data in my hand - always with me - before. How fun!

I dug out some of my old files and entered a lot of my genealogy data into my Zire, person by person. I probably entered 50 people over the next few days. I could enter a lot of it by memory whenever I had a few minutes here and there waiting for something else to happen.

I started searching the Net for family members and information and hit upon a Frakes (my Mom's maiden name) who is a major Frakes researcher and had posted 5000 Frakes census records online. Well, being a database expert, I couldn't resist copying the text file, massaging it and importing it into FileMaker. What a bonanza of information!!! I'll be writing soon about the little FileMaker database I made out of it to help me browse through the data quickly. But I digress...

Getting the 5000 Frakes census records and connecting with George Frakes was just the shot in the arm I needed to take things to the next level with my budding genealogy hobby. George subsequently sent me a great big family tree print out showing me what he knew about my Frakes ancestors.

Entering this abundance of data on my Zire wasn't going to work and I wanted to work with photos. I needed to buy a desktop genealogy program. I had used Reunion 4 and 5 back in the 90's, so upgraded to Reunion 8 which runs on OS X for about $70. I downloaded a free utility for MyRoots that let me export the data in MyRoots into a GED file - the standard data format for genealogy programs. I imported my existing data and have been entering data like crazy since then. Right now I have a total of 289 people in there.

I got my old photos out and started scanning and putting some of them into Reunion. I printed some family trees and sent one plus some scanned photos to my 82-year-old uncle, Roy Frakes whose already told me a juicy story about my great grandmother. I've bought about 5 books on genealogy and am generally having a great time. This hobby is a great one to share with my 88-year-old father who loves to look at old family photos and reminisce about herding cattle while riding his horse Rex on his family farm in Montana.

Here's what I think about genealogy so far. For someone like me who likes to learn, *collect* things and play with computers, it's awesome. To do genealogy *right*, you've got to learn a lot of geography and history. I'm collecting maps and local histories of the various places my ancestors have lived. That's a lot of places when you've got 289 and counting spread over three centuries.

If that weren't enough, this all ties in with my interest in social networking. This hobby gives me instant and very interesting conversation material for all my living relatives plus every amateur and professional genealogist out there. I'm hoping you'll join me and start by writing a little comment to say hi, ask a question or express your thoughts.