Other Software

People change names for many reasons. What’s surprising, at least when new to genealogical research, is that it’s relatively common for a person’s name to change during their lifetime. Since it’s common and adds complexity to our practice, I devised a solution with respect to storing computer files. There are three predominant problems that it eliminates.

The Problems

There are countless people in your genealogy with more than one name. Trying to remember all the name variants and which folders contain the files for each is unnecessary. The computer excels at such things.

Storing duplicates of each file for all the name variants wastes disk space and creates a maintenance problem.

Files relating to one person, but scattered across folders can cause confusion, duplicate effort, and conclusions based on incomplete information.

The Solution

The MacGenealogist File System deals effectively with changing names—both person and place names—by making use of the power and elegance of a little known feature of the Macintosh operating system: aliases. [Read more…] about Handling People with Multiple Names in the MacGenealogist File System

The first Mac task list software I have for your consideration is TaskPaper from Hog Bay Software. It is simultaneously a simple and powerful task manager. It meets both of the criteria I outlined in the first part of this series of articles, Keeping a Genealogy Task List, Part 1:

• Unobtrusive storage
• Simple, powerful retrieval

The developer has created an elegant design that enables entry of tasks in a natural way. Projects are inserted by typing a line of text followed by a colon. Tasks are lines of text preceded by a hyphen and a space. Anything else that’s typed is a note. It doesn’t get any easier than that. [Read more…] about Keeping a Genealogy Task List, Part 2: TaskPaper

Knowing What to do Next

Do you know what task you can do next to move your genealogy research forward the most? How about all the searches you need to do next time you’re on WorldVitalRecords.com? These and other questions are best asked of and answered by an effective genealogy to-do list. Such a task list serves two purposes critical to family history research.

Unobtrusive Storage

The first purpose is to capture all those opportunities you discover while you research one subject, but are too disciplined to go chasing after. We’ve all experienced the peculiar temporal slippage that happens when we succumb to temptation and follow lead after lead; time seems to compress. Hours later we break free of the phenomenon only to find that we haven’t accomplished anything except perhaps entertaining ourselves. [Read more…] about Keeping a Genealogy Task List, Part 1