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Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter
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Ultimate Family Tree Deluxe 3.0 |
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Click Here for Dick Eastman's Archive |
| July 13, 1999 |
- Ultimate Family Tree Deluxe 3.0 The Learning Company has released a major new update of their popular Ultimate Family Tree program. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, but the press release looks very promising: The Learning Company Announces Ultimate Family Tree 3.0 Deluxe Latest Version Includes Ancestor/Descendant Chart, Heredity Statistics Report And More FREMONT, Calif., July 6 -- The Learning Company, a division of Mattel, Inc. (NYSE: MAT), today announced the release of Ultimate Family Tree(TM) Deluxe 3.0, available for Windows for an estimated street price of $29.99. The program offers users an easy way to create a family tree. It creates beautiful printouts, including family trees, charts, and scrapbooks. Research tutorials make this program great for beginners. The latest version includes several new features for the beginning family history enthusiast, including: Ancestor Box Chart that shows ancestors for any given individual Ancestor/Descendant Box Chart displays a person's ancestors and descendants together on one family tree Heredity Statistics Report allows users to easily analyze family data for a better understanding of family dynamics, including medical history Ultimate Family Search searches the Internet and hundreds of CD-ROM resources for users' family information Private Text for sharing information easily and without the worry of divulging confidential information Global Find and Replace allows for making changes to database information quickly and easily New Ways to Display and Organize Family Information The latest version of Ultimate Family Tree includes two new box chart designs: the Ancestor Box Chart and the Ancestor/Descendant Box Chart. Using ancestors whose information has been entered into the program and displayed, the ancestor box chart forms the shape of a tree, starting with a narrow trunk and developing wider branches as the user displays more generations of ancestors to expand upward and outward. The Ancestor/Descendant Box Chart displays both ancestors and descendants together on one family tree, providing a broader view of the family. Increased Customization with Reports Several new features have been added to this version of Ultimate Family Tree to allow users more flexibility and options when creating reports. Ultimate Family Tree has always had ready-made reports to choose from. Now there's more flexibility with the new Customize Reports option, which allows users to print out select data from individuals within a given project for lists and reports. For those conducting family medical research, Ultimate Family Tree has the new Hereditary Statistics Report. With it, users can review important and interesting family data like tracking family medical history, discovering the average number of children per family group, age of parents at children's births, number of male and female children, age of death, age at first marriage, and much more. The Indented Descendant Report now lets users print the marriage date (in addition to the full birth and death dates for each descendant) of any given person. And the User Editable Short Footnotes allows users to customize how they want short footnotes to print in reports. Users will be able to accurately cite the source of their information, as well as create their own short form templates and notes. New Research Tools and Options Family research can often be time consuming. However, with the efficient Ultimate Family Search feature, users can quickly search the Internet and hundreds of CD-ROM resources. Ultimate Family Search then reports back on where to find historical records about users' ancestors. It concurrently searches for information on everyone in a project file enabling users to save a wealth of time. Users can now enter information quicker than ever with Ultimate Family Tree's Spreadsheet-like Data Input. It lets users rapidly enter a large group of people associated with a single event or source into the database. For example, certain records, such as census pages, contain information on numerous people. This new feature lets users enter all the information from the census document in one place. The program then links all of the people listed in the census document to the census event and automatically updates each individual's record. Ultimate Family Tree features Private Text, which lets users share information easily, without the worry of divulging confidential information. With a single click, users can hide private information about any family member, then make printouts and export or copy files for others to use without the concern of distributing personal data. Global Find and Replace allows changes to be made to the database of information quickly and easily. It supports all records of a given type, individual groups, and last search lists. Availability and System Requirements Ultimate Family Tree Deluxe 3.0 is available in now for an estimated street price of $29.99. It is available through retail stores, the Internet at http://www.uftree.com, or by calling 800-397-4243. Ultimate Family Tree 3.0 requires Windows 95/98, Pentium 90 MHz, 16 MB RAM, 256 color SVGA monitor (16 bit high color or greater recommended), 50 MB of hard disk space (5 MB of storage per 1000 individuals), double-speed CD-ROM drive. Optional 14.4 KBPS modem (28.8 KBPS or faster recommended. User is responsible for all Internet access fees and phone charges). Ultimate Family Tree is a very powerful genealogy program that used to sell for a lot more money. Like most other genealogy programs, the price of Ultimate Family Tree has dropped a lot in the past year or two. I suspect that version 3.0 is a very attractive program for $29.99. I hope to write a full review on it within a few weeks. - More on Personal Ancestral File version 4.0 for Windows Since publishing a review of Personal Ancestral File version 4.0 for Windows in last week’s newsletter, I received e-mails from several people with questions or comments. Three people pointed out an inaccuracy in my review: there is a method for filtering out data for living people when creating a Web page. In the "Create Web Page" menu, the lower right corner contains checkboxes for "Hide details for the living" and for "Show names." I tried these options and found that they work well. I mentioned that version 3.0 of Personal Ancestral File had an extra-cost add-on utility called PAF Companion that produces excellent charts and Register-style reports. It can also make huge wall charts. I noted that PAF Companion is not compatible with the internal database of PAF version 4.0. The new release has a database that is similar to version 3.0, but with "extensions." I speculated that the LDS Church might drop PAF Companion entirely. A couple of people who work for the Family History Department of the LDS Church wrote to say that a patch for PAF Companion will be available soon. Once installed, the patched version will be compatible with PAF version 4.0. That’s great news. I love the reports that are generated by PAF Companion. I also quoted a statement by Bob Hyte of the Hope Foundation concerning the "ancestry" of PAF version 4.0. Bob wrote, "However, we would like to mention that the major difference is that the PAF 4.0 product has been frozen. You will see an occasional "bug fix" download every so often, but you will not see any major function or design changes." The folks at the Family History Department of the LDS Church wrote to say that they disagree a bit with Mr. Hyte’s words. To be sure, the work by the Hope Foundation may stop, but the LDS Church’s Family History Department programmers will be working diligently to add new features and to fix any bugs that are found in the product. The design of PAF version 4.0 certainly is not "frozen." One person wrote to dispute my disappointment at one of PAF version 4.0’s shortcomings. In the review I pointed out that the program has only one date and one place name for each of life’s major events such as birth, marriage and death. I find this to be very limiting as almost all genealogists have some conflicting records and will want to record two or even more dates or places until they can determine which one is correct. This correspondent pointed out that the user could easily create new tags such as BIRTH2 or BIRTH3 or DEATH2 or DEATH3 to record the conflicting records. Indeed, that is an easy and elegant solution for entering the multiple dates and locations into the database. However, getting the data back out in various reports will still be an issue. The reports will still use the regular BIRTH or DEATH field as the primary record and will ignore other tags like BIRTH2. That may or may not meet the needs of the individual researcher. Also, we had a bit of e-mail discussion about using that one date field, and I decided that the topic interested me enough that I would repeat much of the discussion in this newsletter. The BIRTH, MARRIAGE, DEATH and other event fields in Personal Ancestral File version 4.0 for Windows will allow "freeform dates." That is, when the user has two or more dates that seem to conflict with each other, the data can be entered as regular text, such as "1810/1811" or "Possibly 1810 or 1811." Another example might be "March 13, 1810 or March 13, 1811." In fact, it is possible to enter "Between Jan. 1810 & July 24, 1811" or almost any other brief date description. This flexibility will allow conflicting data to be entered into the database, and it will look good on most of the printed reports. However, it falls apart in two other areas: (1.) source citations and (2.) complex data. Almost all "how to do genealogy research" courses stress the need to document, document, document. Over and over we are told that every fact entered into our genealogy databases must be accompanied by a proper source citation telling where that fact was found and must also give the location (repository) of the record that supports the fact. For instance, a date of birth might give a source as "Portland, Maine town clerk’s records, Volume 3, Page 37" and a repository of "Portland, Maine, City Hall." The source citation may even give the shelf number where the records are kept. I wish that someone had told me the reasons for keeping good source citations when I first started doing genealogy research. I didn’t have such advice, and in my early days I didn’t record the source citations for anything. In fact, the early genealogy programs didn’t have the capability to record source citations. My present database still has hundreds of unsourced records. I am working on filling them in as I have time. Several times I have uncovered new records that contradict information entered into my database years ago. I then said to myself, "I wonder which one is correct? Where did I find that other piece of information?" Without proper source records, I cannot tell. Many hours of research have to be repeated before I can tell which record is correct. All of today’s better genealogy programs have provisions for recording sources and repositories. The source citation database in Personal Ancestral File version 4.0 is a rather good one. However, like most of the other genealogy programs, the PAF version 4.0 database handles one source per "fact." Since only one fact is allowed per birth, death, etc., there is no room to enter multiple sources and repositories. A date of "March 13, 1810 or March 13, 1811" really needs at least two source citations, one for each date. PAF version 4.0 really isn’t designed for that. Other programs that allow more than one date of birth, death, etc. can have a separate source citation for each fact. As a result, the genealogy programs that fully support multiple dates for any fact are better research tools. The other shortcoming of "free form dates" occurs when the data becomes more complex. Last week I used a real-life example: the confusion over my great-great-grandfather’s date and place of birth. However, I skipped over all the details in last week’s review. In fact, I literally have found four different places of birth for great-great-granddad: Nashua, New Hampshire; Tamworth, New Hampshire; Salisbury, Massachusetts; and Portland, Maine. I have two different dates of birth: April 3, 1810 and April 3, 1811. In addition, some other records simply state 1810 or 1811 without giving the exact month and date. I have found these contradictory records in at least 6 different sources ranging from U.S. census records to the marriage application of his son to town clerk records and one reference in an old genealogy book of the Eastman family. The question is, how do I squeeze these two dates, four birth locations and 6 sources into the one birth source citation that PAF 4.0 gives? I can do that easily with some other genealogy programs by entering six different birth records, each one properly attributed as to the source and repository where that record was found. Also, I should be able to give some analysis of the likelihood of each record. In the above example, I think that a birth location of Salisbury, Massachusetts is highly unlikely. Nashua, New Hampshire is a lukewarm possibility, and the other two are very possible. I want to enter my opinion of the likelihood of each source. This is called "weighing the evidence" and is fully supported by all the better genealogy programs of 1999. In these other genealogy programs, I can give a "rating" of zero through three or perhaps one to five on each and every source citation. When printing reports or generating HTML pages, I can specify "only print the dates and locations where I have rated the evidence at 2 or higher" or something similar. I don't know of any way to squeeze all that into one properly documented source citation, as in PAF version 4.0. I certainly cannot weigh each one individually in PAF like I can in the other programs. Sure, I can use a source citation of "See my handwritten notes" or something similar, but that's a kludge. Finally, Jim Cobbs wrote an e-mail that praised the date calculation routines in Personal Ancestral File version 4.0: "You might want to say something about that little date calculation program gem buried in the package. I would even pay something for it as a separate program. I downloaded PAF for Windows just to see what it was like and found the date calculator. Love at first sight." Many thousands of people have downloaded Personal Ancestral File version 4.0 for Windows since its release on June 28. That number certainly will grow to hundreds of thousands and possibly millions within a few months. It is a slick, easy-to-use genealogy program that has many features. I may point out some things that I consider to be shortcomings, but I also must say that it is more powerful and has more features than most of the programs we were all using just a few years ago. The fact that it is free guarantees that it will become very popular. Personal Ancestral File version 4.0 for Windows also will attract the authors of third-party add-on utility programs who will add even more functionality. I suspect you will be reading about PAF 4.0 often, both in this newsletter and in other genealogy publications. The following announcement is from Mike St. Clair, Webmaster for the (U.S.) Federation of Genealogical Societies: The FGS Society Hall is now online! The Federation of Genealogical Societies is now providing a new service for both societies and individual genealogists in the form of the FGS Society Hall. It is a new searchable database of genealogical societies intended to be directly maintained by the societies themselves. If you are a genealogist looking for a society with which to associate or correspond, you can search by name (or part of the name), locality, or even the zip code. If you are a society officer wanting to publicize your society, you can add and maintain a record at the FGS Society Hall. Those societies who are members of FGS can enter extensive information including meeting, membership, officer, publication, and library details. All societies, whether FGS members or not, may add contact information including e-mail and home page addresses and telephone numbers. You may reach the Society Hall by visiting the FGS Home Page at http://www.fgs.org/ and following the link to the Society Hall. While at the FGS Home Page, check out the other resources available from FGS, including a national calendar, conference details, services for societies, publications, etc. Mike St. Clair - Irish Telephone Listings Now Online Genealogists love telephone books. They are great for finding long-lost cousins as well as possible descendants of that ancestor with the unusual surname. The only thing that genealogists love more than telephone books are ONLINE telephone books. Here we can search the equivalent of thousands of printed telephone books, and we can do it within seconds. Online telephone directories have been available in the United States for several years. Other countries have been adding online directories, too, and now Ireland has an online telephone directory. Irish residential listings are now available at: http://www.goldenpages.ie - Ancestry.com Adds Telephone and Address Listings Ancestry.com has also added more telephone directory listings to its databases. 12.2 million Canadian telephone directory records were added this week. "The Canadian records are part of our ongoing effort to increase the amount of international family history research data available at Ancestry.com," said Curt Allen, president and CEO of Ancestry.com. "These telephone records, offered free of charge, will help millions of people trace their family in the Canadian provinces." "We are confident these Canadian records will prove as beneficial as our U.S. phone and address listings, which receive up to 40,000 views each day," said Allen. "We are committed to providing our visitors with new information, so they can continue to break family research barriers from the comfort of their living rooms." To view the Canadian telephone listings, as well as many other databases, look at: http://www.ancestry.com - Worcestershire Pigot's 1842 Directory on CD-ROM The following is an announcement written by S&N Genealogy Supplies in England: This UK CD resource forms both a research tool and a valuable insight into the lives of your ancestors and what governed their lives. It covers all the major professions, nobility, gentry, clergy, taverns and pubs of the area. Entries include the trade, name and address. The book has sections on each major town and surrounding villages. The sections start by giving a history of the area with a great deal of detail, as you would find in a gazetteer. Information on the main trades conducted and the levels of education and public services are also provided. The parishes are listed for each area; these are particularly useful for those requiring to search for further information in Parish Records of baptisms and marriages. Market days, fairs and other local events are recorded in detail. You can even find out how your ancestors may have traveled with timetables of which coaches and carriers served each town and at what Inns they stopped at. An Extract follows: Dudley is a market town, parliamentary borough and parish, in the hundred of Halfshire, but entirely surrounded by the county of Stafford. This place derives its name from Dodo or Dudo a Saxon prince to whom it belonged and who built a castle here about the year 700.... Through the caverns runs a water-level tunnel nearly two miles in length connecting Birmingham, Dudley and Stourbridge.... This town is justly celebrated for its manufacture of flint glass, which is here produced in a vast extent, in every variety and elegance...The market is held on Saturday and the fairs on the 8th of May and 2nd of October, for cattle, cheese, and wool and the 5th of August for lambs. The Parish of Dudley contained in 1821 18,211 inhabitants and in 1831 23,043. It then lists the trades from Agents to Wheelwrights in the form: Barometer Dealers and Umbrella Makers The CD is available in a searchable form at £21.95 or purely as images at £11.95 inclusive of VAT & P&P for UK and airmail for all other countries. Both come with software for both Windows and Macintosh computers. Information on this and many other regional resources for the UK are available on http://www.genealogy.demon.co.uk or http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Genealogy_Supplies/whatsnew.htm. - Charlottesville, Virginia Records Online The Virginia Center for Digital History and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and Afro-American Studies have created some large online databases that are of interest to genealogists researching records in Charlottesville, Virginia. While the primary thrust of the online website is African American genealogy research, the databases are valuable to anyone researching white ancestry in the same city. Databases available online include: Charlottesville 1910 census The same website also has numerous pictures that are quite interesting and a lot of historical background. To view the databases and pictures, look at: http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/cvilleenter.html - Henry County Obituary Trading Post Linda M. Everhart has started the Henry County (Missouri) Obituary Trading Post. This is an index of over 4,700 obituaries and death notices that were published in Henry County newspapers. A few of the obituaries have been transcribed in their entirety. However, most of the obituaries have only been indexed. Most of the originals are not online. You will need to obtain photocopies directly from the newspapers. Linda described her efforts this way: I started this site in March of this year, and since I had a collection of over 4000 obituaries from the Clinton Daily Democrat, I started an Obituary Trading Post. I posted the names and death years of the people I had obits on and asked visitors to send in the obits they had for Henry County people or relations and I would, in turn, post the one they sent and the one they requested from the list. This has worked out better than expected (so many researchers are tight with their information). Since March, I have been able to post over 516 obituaries on my website. I want all county coordinators and genealogy Webmasters to know about this so that they might come up with something similar to get more people involved in sharing. Good Day & Good Research Linda M. Everhart The Obituary Trading Post can be found at: http://www.rootsweb.com/~mohenry/obitindex.htm - Search Engines Only Find 16% of the Web’s Contents A new study by Dr. Steve Lawrence and Dr. C. Lee Giles for the NEC Research Institute finds that search engines only catalog about 16% of the Web pages that are available. In fact, search engine coverage of the Web has decreased substantially since December 1997, with no search engine indexing more than 16 percent of the Web's indexable sites. That means, for surfers navigating the Web via search engines, the Web's 15 terabytes of data is more than ever like an iceberg -- largely underwater. And, for e-commerce sites, not being indexed by search engines could be the difference between sinking and swimming. Lawrence said the reason for decreasing coverage of the Web is simple -- the search engines just can't keep up with the explosive growth in indexable pages -- but he asserts "that trend is going to reverse." And why will it reverse? "At the moment, you have a lot of information out there that's not available on the Web," Lawrence said. But once all that information is available on the Web, the avalanche of indexable information getting posted on the Web will slow, allowing the search engines to catch up. And how long will it take for that information avalanche to ease? Lawrence hasn't done precise calculations, but hazards an educated guess: "10, 20 years." "Engines will be able to improve their coverage over time, but the question is, will they really want to?" he pondered. The following is a list of some of the genealogy-related World Wide Web home pages that have been listed recently on http://www.rootscomputing.com. Some of these sites may charge a fee for their services: Genealogy in Crawford County, Pennsylvania: http://genealogy.toolcity.net The Virginia Halsteads - History and Genealogy: http://www.geocities.com/heartland/cottage/7190 Gassiot Family Genealogy Site, including Gassiot, Gassiott And Gasiot: This site has versions in four languages - English, Catalan, French, Spanish: http://members.xoom.com/gassiots/Chuck.html Popp Family Genealogy Web Page: http://popp-family.rootsweb.com/ San Antonio Genealogy and Historical Society (SAGHS): http://saghs.home.texas.net A website to assist anyone researching families from the Calliope / Gladstone districts of Central Queensland, Australia: http://calliopeorigins.web-page.net Indexes to the Essex (Massachusetts) Antiquarian, all 13 volumes, (only 10 were in the Antiquarian's index). This is a great site for Essex County, Massachusetts researchers: http://www.essexbooks.com Charlotte's web is a genealogy website devoted to research on Bosworth and Bennett lines. It also includes many other New England families such as Hale, Morse, Nichols, Davis and Geer: http://www.primenet.com/~cbrennan/ "The JONES' . . . Help me keep up with them!" The ancestry of David A. Jones can be found at: http://shannajones.webjump.com Craycraft Home Page, for all spellings of the surname Craycraft: http://members.delphi.com/denut/index.html Murphy's Public House is dedicated to the Irish and German families of Ohio with searchable databases, historical features and many genealogy related items: http://murphy.genealogy.org "The Gould Family in America" including Gold, Goold, Goolde, Goole, Gould and Gowle: http://www.orbitworld.net/blgould/genealog.html Sewell Family - The history of the Sewell family descending from Jesse Sewell. Includes descendants in Pulaski County and Cumberland County, Kentucky as well as Overton [Fentress] County, Tennessee: http://www.edm.net/~Pjsewell To submit your home page to this newsletter, enter the necessary information at: http://www.rootscomputing.com/register.htm. Due to the volume of new Web pages submitted, I am not able to list all of them in the newsletter.
Click Here for Dick Eastman's Archive
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