The Aspen 2000 software is a rather large program, so it is delivered on a CD-ROM disk. Installation was rather simple although the CD-ROM did not have Autostart. Instead, I simply navigated to the CD-ROM disk and double-clicked on the Setup icon. The setup asked for a password that comes on a small piece of paper included with the CD-ROM disk. I followed the on-screen instructions, and about sixty seconds later I was looking at a README.TXT file with some detailed information. Aspen 2000 is then launched in the same manner as most any other Windows program.

Aspen 2000’s first menu screen is colorful, with a nice picture of a lush cemetery in the middle of the page. Surrounding the picture are various checkboxes, icons, and statistics. The layout seems logical, and I found it easy to understand.

Data entry and retrieval is divided into three areas:

1. Cemetery Burial and Location Records
2. Funeral Home: Burial and Location Records
3. Obituaries: Source and Obituary Records

I started with Cemetery Burial and Location Records. I first clicked on New Location to create a master record of the first cemetery I wanted to record. I was next prompted to provide a lot of information, including cemetery name, town, county, state, type (abandoned, church, city, county, Federal, lost, private, veterans, etc.), date established, date last visited, condition, and directions to the cemetery. I was especially pleased to note that the database has fields for recording the latitude and longitude of the cemetery, something that I believe will become very common now that low cost GPS receivers and online mapping databases are readily available. The cemetery location database also has the capability to store a picture of the cemetery. You must enter the cemetery name; all the other fields are optional.

Once the cemetery is created as a master record, you can start entering burial information for the people interred there. The "New Burial" icon produces a new page for data entry that looks quite similar to the New Cemetery screen described earlier. However, there are many more fields for data entry (again, most of them are optional), including:

• Source date
• First name
• Middle name
• Last name
• Sex
• Maiden name
• Nickname
• Date of burial
• Date of birth
• Date of death
• Age at time of death
• Years, months and days lived, such as 15 years, 5 months, 22 days
• Spouse’s name
• Check boxes for military marker, funeral home marker, head stone, foot stone, and other markers
• A check box for "Do all the markers match?"
• Marker general comments
• General grave and site information
• Section name
• Plot name
• Lot name
• Row name
• Lot owner first name
• Lot owner middle name
• Lot owner last name
• Grid map position 1
• Grid map position 2
• Cemetery burial inscriptions (up to three hundred and twenty characters)

In addition to all of the above, you can also store a picture of the tombstone. The Aspen 2000 program even has controls to increase and decrease the image width and height. More sophisticated image manipulation is best done by an external imaging program, however.

I next investigated the Funeral Home: Burial and Location Records and Obituaries: Source and Obituary Records sections. These are quite similar in operation to the Cemetery Burial and Location Records that I just described. Obviously, the data entry fields are different. However, they are equally detailed. The Obituary data was especially interesting to me. The primary source would be the name of a newspaper or an archive of obituaries found at a library or something similar. For instance, it could simply be, "The Bangor Daily News." Then you enter data found in various obituaries printed in that newspaper over the years, including such fields as date of death, time of death, cause of death, spouse, number of children, number of grandchildren, number of great-grandchildren children, officiating clergy, funeral home name, cemetery name, and much more. Again, a scanned image of the actual obituary record can be stored in Aspen 2000’s database.

Of course, in any database program the big question is, "What kind of reports will it generate?" In this case, the answer is, "A lot." In fact, the options screen where you specify what you want in a particular report is almost overwhelming with options.

Let’s start first with the Location or Source Records. The reports can be printed in multiple ways. You first specify Sort Order, which includes five different ways to sort or index the data to print. Next is the format of the actual report. Again, you have six different formats. You will need to look at each format before you decide which one you would like to use. A few of the reports are two-column reports. Some formats allow you to print (or not to print) the images when they are attached. The option to print images will only be available to you on formats that allow you to print images. You can also elect to not print images on reports that normally print images by setting the "Print Images" button to "no." Print mode is the next option. You have the option of printing in portrait or landscape mode. Setting the margins is also an option; you can elect to have wide margins on all pages, just the even numbered pages, or just the odd numbered pages. This option is valuable when you are printing to publish a book, where you need a front and back page, where you would want to switch the margins for odd and even pages. There are several other output formats available, including the ability to print on index cards.

Next, the Burial or Death Records Reports have similar options: the left page tab will give you burial and death records print options. You will notice that most all the options you saw in location or source records are here as well, along with a few more. First you have twelve different ways to sort the data rather than the five for Locations. You also have six formats to work with. Burial records also give you an option to print a "back of book" type of index. This index will print in two columns when in portrait mode or three columns when in landscape mode. The index will print in alphabetical order by surname first, then first or given name, then by middle name. In cases where you have a maiden name for a female, that maiden name will also print after the person's name enclosed in brackets, as in "[Name]".

Once you have specified all this, you move on to the Records Selection menus. You can elect to print all records in the database, any one record in the database, all records of one cemetery, all records of a particular surname, all the records of a particular town, and many more selection options as well. The Aspen 2000 Web site has some nice pictures of the reports. If these reporting features do not meet your needs, the program’s producers will even produce custom reports to your specifications for a modest fee.

In addition to basic data storage and retrieval, Aspen 2000 has some nifty utilities, including a birth date calculator. For instance, many tombstones will list the date of death and the person’s age at that time, such as "Died Feb. 26, 1994, aged 15 years, 5 months and 22 days." You can use the birth date calculator to determine that this person’s date of birth was September 6, 1978. You can manually type the data in or even browse through an on-screen calendar and click on the appropriate days.

The Aspen 2000 program also includes a Soundex calculator for determining sound-alike names. It also has a "Things To Do" list to help plan your future research, a Scratchpad for simple memos, and a long list of genealogical abbreviations you may encounter.

Aspen 2000 also includes an excellent user’s guide in electronic format. This ninety-page manual contains a lot of screen shots of the program in operation. It leads you step-by-step through the operation of the program. The user’s manual is shipped on the CD-ROM disk as a Microsoft Word document, not as a printed manual. You can use your favorite word processor to view the manual since most word processors can read Word documents. You can simply read the book on the screen, as I do, or print specific pages. Of course, you could also print the entire user’s manual if you really want to.

Aspen 2000 is a very powerful indexing and publishing program for cemetery, funeral home and obituary records. I believe that it will become popular amongst individual genealogists. I also suspect that it will appeal to local genealogy societies and historical societies. This is an excellent database for storing extracted records from local sources.

On the downside, Aspen 2000 certainly is a U.S.-centric program. The location fields are labeled town, county and state. There is no capability to specify "province" or other non-U.S. geographic naming conventions. I also did not see any capability to store titles, such as "Dr." or "Rev." I also would like to see a capability to produce HTML files, suitable for uploading to a Web site. That would be a great feature for a local society to extract cemetery, obituary or funeral home records and make them available to everyone on the Web. I don’t know of any full-featured cemetery, funeral home or obituary records program that does this today, but it looks like a natural enhancement for a future version of Aspen 2000.

Aspen 2000 is a 32-bit Windows application and therefore requires one of the following Windows Operating Systems: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, or Windows 2000. It will not run on Windows 3.1. The program also requires at least 16 megabytes of RAM when used on Windows 98 and probably more on newer operating systems. However, the producer reports that Aspen 2000 will be rather slow on a 16 megabyte system and recommends at least 64 megabytes of RAM memory for pleasant operation.

A requirement of 64 megabytes of RAM memory would have seemed outrageous only two or three years ago. However, all new systems are built with that much or more these days. Older computers really should be upgraded, too. I noticed that Square Planet is selling 256-megabyte memory modules for $34.50 these days. Other mail-order companies probably have similar prices.

In summation, I would describe Aspen 2000 as a specialized database program. You could store similar information in Access or Filemaker or most any general-purpose database program. If you are a talented software developer, you probably could even develop your own version of most of the features in Aspen 2000. However, I don’t think you would want to. The developers of Aspen 2000 have obviously invested hundreds of hours in creating a special program for storing cemetery, funeral home and obituary records. It is a polished program with lots of features. Even if I had the talent to develop such a database program myself, I’d most likely purchase Aspen 2000. The hard work has already been done, so now I can focus on the most important part: data.

Aspen 2000 sells for $89.95 (U.S. funds). The company has a demo version that you can download first and take for a "test drive." The demo version is a working version, not a "slide show." You will be able to enter, edit, delete, print, save to the many file formats, and use all the utilities contained in the Aspen program. However, the demo version will only allow you to input Cemetery Location and Cemetery Burial records. The other two sections are disabled for this demo. The demo also will only allow you to enter a maximum of 10 Cemetery Locations and/or 75 Burial Records. While all reports and forms are available to you, demo reports are limited to 3 pages. This should be an excellent means of trying the program before spending any money.

Aspen 2000 is produced by Design Software. This is the same company that produces Genealogy Charts & Forms Version 5.0, a program that I wrote about in the September 6, 2001 edition of this newsletter. That review is available at: www.ancestry.com/library/view/columns/eastman/4521.asp.

To learn more about Aspen 2000, to look at screen shots, to download the demo version, or to purchase the complete version, go to: www.DesignSW.net/aspen.htm.

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