Reunion 9 for Mac Perspective Events Updated

Today I updated the North American Perspective Events file that I’ve previously modified and shared with you. This brings the Reunion 9 for Mac perspective event set up-to-date with historical events affecting the region since 1968. Specifically, I added these events:

1973 Arab Oil Embargo
1989 Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement
1994 North American Free Trade Agreement
2001 Canada and U.S. assist in military intervention in Afghanistan
2007 Financial crisis in U.S. triggers world-wide recession

This wasn’t as easy as it once was because in the current release of Mac OS X (version 10.7, aka Lion), Apple hid the Library folder from view in the Finder. Perhaps some background is in order.

Background on Perspective Events

Perspective events are brief descriptions of historical events that provide context to your ancestor’s lives in timeline charts and ages lists in genealogy software, Reunion 9 for Mac.

Sets of perspective events may be saved in a file for later reuse or sharing. It’s simple to create your own perspective event sets for Reunion. An event set is a plain text or RTF formatted file with events on separate lines. The date comes first, followed by a tab and the title of the event. The file’s extension is .pEvents. It must be located in your ~/Library/Application Support/Reunion/Perspective Events/ folder. Here’s where the snag is.

The Limitation of Lion

Apple has hidden this folder in Lion. They also gave us the ability to get to it when we need to. Since this folder is needed infrequently, I suggest using this temporary method of opening it:

Click “Go” on the Finder menu bar. Press the Option key on your keyboard. That will make the Library folder appear in the list of locations (between Home and Computer). While holding the Option key, so the choice doesn’t disappear, click Library in the list of locations. A Finder window will open showing you the contents of the Library folder. From this point you can continue navigate to the ~/Library/Application Support/Reunion/Perspective Events/ folder.

Here’s the link to download the GenealogyTools Reunion for Mac Perspective Event Archive for your own use. Extract the files from the archive then copy the .pEvents files into the Perspective Events folder as described above.