Treelines Now Offers Collaboration

I received the following email today from Treelines introducing collaboration.

The #1 feature request we've gotten is that you want to work with your family to build your family tree and write stories together. Well, today is the day—now you can!

Maybe you have a story you want to write, but your cousins need to add pictures from each of their family albums? Perhaps you and your siblings have unique memories about your grandmother you want to put in one place? Now you can all work together on Treelines! Learn more about these new features! »

My Legacy Family Tree 8 Wish List

I’ve been hearing rumors that a new version of Legacy Family Tree will be released later this year.  In fact, Geoff Rasmussen will be discussing it at SCGS Jamboree later today in a demo called “What’s New in Legacy Family Tree 8.”  (Boy, I wish that session was being streamed live!!).  While I have no details, I do look forward to the Legacy 8 release.  In the meantime, I thought I share a few of my “wish list” items. 

First, Legacy has been due for an upgrade for awhile now.  Compared to many of the other popular programs, such as Roots Magic and Family Tree Maker, Legacy’s user interface looks a little dated.  Personally, I could care less.  As long as it does what I need it to do and it’s laid out in a manner that jives with my workflow,  I don’t really care about aesthetics.  There are a few things I’d like to remain the same, but there are also some things I’d like to see changed improve functionality.  Here’s my wish list:

Keep Some Things the Same!

Although I imagine there will be some cosmetic changes to the UI, I hope that they maintain the integrity of the program.  For example, I hope they don’t change anything structurally in the Family view (pictured below). 

Out of the other programs I have tried, Legacy’s family view is the best, in my opinion.  It’s like having a family group sheet on your screen, and I certainly appreciate that visual.  I also like that fact that you can customize what data is displayed for the focus couple, as well as how the children are displayed (I prefer the two-column view).  This is also the only program (of those I’ve tried) that displays the family in a top-down manner.  The focus couple is in the middle, their parents above, and children below.  Other programs seem to be going with the side-view, similar to a pedigree chart, and I have a hard time with that.

Another thing I don’t want to see changed is the data entry screen for an individual (pictured) below.  I like that the vital stats are called out at the top, while all other events are displayed below.  I also like the fact that you can change the sort order of the events to sort by date or name.

Data Entry of Location

I really want to see the location field split into two fields that I can see. In other words, I’d like to see a field for the “place” and the “location” and see both fields. 

For example, I want to be able to have a “place” field in the burial information so I can enter the name of the cemetery, independent of the “location” (i.e., city, county, state).  This way, my master locations remain manageable and I have consistency with the name of the cemetery. 

I would also like this “place” field to function just as the master locations, where you can add notes to the master “place” such as address, directions, GPS coordinates, and/or notes such as previous or other names of the location, and once it’s set up, it can be reused as a master.

Yes, I realize that there are some options currently available (see image below), but it’s a buried (no pun intended) feature and I cannot tell by looking at the screen in what cemetery this person is buried in unless I make it a master location.  I would like the notes to stay, as this is where I enter the plot information.

The same can be said for the other vital events, such as place of birth and death (e.g., name of hospital) and baptism (e.g., name of church).  I’d also like to see this option for all event types solely to maintain consistency.  Sure, I can enter an event for a funeral, and put the church name in the description field, but because it’s not a master, that church name could be altered each time I enter it whether it be for a funeral, baptism, confirmation, or other church event.  And again, any information added to the “place” field, such as address, would be carried along.  A change of this type would require a lot of cleanup, but I’m okay with that.

Sources

First and foremost, I want to be able to source each piece of an event.  For example, if the source I have only gives me a date of birth, but not the location, I want to attach the source to the date piece only, not the entire birth event.

The other thing I’d like to see with regard to sources is the ability to customize the available templates and create new templates.  One of my pet peeves is the way some source templates operate. 

For example, the US census templates want you to specify the state and county in the master source.  However, when you are dealing with a ton of places over many years, that list will grow astronomically!  So, I choose to have one master source for each year, and then put the city, county, and state in the city field of the source detail.  It of course renders my source citation a little differently, but at least it’s consistent and I don’t have an insane amount of sources, by place, for each census.  If I were able to customize the source template, I could probably fix that problem.  I could also create custom templates for sources where no template exists, which I could then reuse to maintain consistency.

Either of these changes would require a lot of data cleaning.  However, most of us are still cleaning up from the old source system to the SourceWriter system, so, hey, why not.  Unfortunately, that’s just they way it works with software sometimes.

Events Attached to Multiple People

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just enter an event for one person and then add other people and their “role” to that “master” event?  (Yes, there is a program out there that does this very thing.)  It would certainly be great for censuses; add the event to the head of household and attach everyone else to the event (instead of copying/pasting the event for each person).  Then, if you make a change to the event, say you made a typo or found new information, it would update it for everyone attached. 

This would also be great for events such as weddings or funerals, where you can attached those who attended the event.  It would also work well for records such as deeds, where you could attached the grantee and grantor, as well as any witnesses (certainly helps with analysis when using the FAN principle).

Last Words

This isn’t too much to wish for, is it?  Guess we’ll find out soon.  What about you, do you have a Legacy wish list?  Leave a comment and let me know what you’re hoping to see in Legacy 8.

Making Some More Changes Around Here

I’ve been doing the Surname Saturday theme for six weeks now and already I’m changing things up.  You may have noticed that the post from earlier today was a little different and that’s because I had a brilliant idea!

The one thing that was bothering me while working on these posts was that as research continues, the information published becomes outdated or incorrect.  Instead of editing the post or republishing it, I decided that I am going to use Scribd.  The blog posts will continue, but instead of the text being part of the actual post, the Scribd document will be embedded in its place.

By using Scribd, I can create a document using Word, which I have more control over than the blog post (I just don’t do heavy-duty coding anymore, and honestly, it gives me a headache), and I have more real estate to work with.  When I’m done with the Word document, I simply create a PDF version and upload it to Scribd (you do not have to convert the Word document to a PDF, you can simply upload the Word file to Scribd—I just choose to make it a PDF file). 

Written In Post	Written In Word

Not only do I have more control over the layout and design, I can update the Word document at anytime, even over a period of time.  And when I feel there are significant changes, I can create a new PDF and upload a new version of the document to Scribd.  Instead of adding a new document to Scribd, and either keeping or deleting the original, I just go to the original and put the new version “over” it.  This way, I don’t have to fill in the title, description, type, etc. all over again, AND, the original link remains in tact.  So if you linked to it or embedded it in a blog post or web page, no changes need to be made to those links or embeds and the newest version will be the one that is displayed. 

Hopefully I’ll find some time to update the first five Surname Saturday posts using Scribd, but moving forward, this is how I will be doing them.  In fact, I think I may be using this approach with other posts where frequent updates may be necessary in the future, but we’ll just have to see.

Feeling Hot, Hot, Hot

Imagine my surprise when I opened Christmas presents and discovered the Kindle Fire among the bunch.  I hadn’t asked for it, since I had just gotten a regular Kindle for Christmas the year before and it was working just fine for me.  While I knew there were plenty new features with Kindle Fire, I was quite content with my plain-Jane Kindle.  But I gotta say, I’m very impressed with Kindle Fire.  Here’s why:

Tablet-Like

To me, the Kindle Fire is similar to a tablet-style laptop.  You can do a ton of things on the Kindle Fire beyond reading books and documents:

• Listen to music
• Watching videos
• Surf the net
• Play games

It even has word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation-making software.  You also have the ability to download apps (see Applications below).

Applications 

There are several applications already available for Kindle Fire, and I’m sure there are more to come.  First, I must admit my guilty pleasure of playing the game Words With Friends, so of course I have that app (it’s much more user-friendly than the Facebook version). 

Although Legacy’s Families app was not initially available for Kindle Fire, as I was preparing this post, I found that it now is and am having fun setting it up and working with it.  Very cool!  It syncs back and forth with Legacy (on my PC), so now I can have an updated family tree wherever I go!  And is has virtually the same user interface as Legacy, which is wonderful (you can “test drive” the app before you purchase it, and as you will see, it has the same look and feel as Legacy).

When I first got the device, Families wasn’t available so in the meantime, I downloaded the Ancestry.com app, which allows access to my online family trees.  When you access a tree, it downloads it to your device, making it available offline as well, which is nice.  The only problem with this is that my online tree is out-of-date, so when I tried to use it while doing newspaper research at the library, the family I was working on wasn’t up-to-date and the little bit of information I had was of little use to me.  To “fix” this problem quickly, I created family groups sheets and saved them as PDFs and transferred them to my Kindle Fire.  That helped tremendously.  But now that Families is available, loaded on my Kindle Fire, and working, this will definitely become my new best friend for on-site research.

Portable

Since there are so many ways I can use the Kindle Fire, I think it will replace my laptop while conducting on-site genealogy research.

The One Negative, Which Isn’t That Bad

The battery life on the Kindle Fire is about eight hours, compared to my regular Kindle, which, with the wi-fi off can last over two months of consistent use.  At first this worried me.  But as I thought about it, the Kindle Fire battery lasts longer than my laptop right now (two issues, one being old batteries, the other being that since I upgraded to Win 7, it doesn’t find the second battery bay).  So it’s really not that bad, when compared to my laptop, and of course the Kindle Fire is smaller, lighter, and easy to transport, while my laptop can be a pain in the a$$.

All-in-all, a great device for the money.  And I’m still using my regular Kindle mainly for reading books.  The nice thing is that the two devices will sync the books, so switching devices in the middle of a book is not an issue.