Family Historian User Group

Just wanted to mention that I use a Notepad drop-in replacement called Metapad -- it is freeware, available at: http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/ I find it to be more friendly than Notepad, so if editing your GEDCOM in Notepad causes problems, give Metapad a try. Also, I wonder if another GEDCOM u...

alywil said: Hi Everyone, I just wanted to say that Jan's (JMurphy) advice in the 2nd post is as good as it gets. Looking back over my own first year of floundering, then my 2nd year of starting to get the gist, Jan has eloquently and completely presented everything I needed to know and am only jus...

I use the free program IrfanView http://www.irfanview.com/ to work with images. It can re-size images for you if you need. When working with these faint images, sometimes it helps to make them smaller. My husband showed me how to use the photo-manipulation tools. Using the 'negative' function (makes...

For an update on the saga of 'Jan's search of the IGI by batch': I decided to start over and download all the marriages in one file and all the christenings in another file, and then to merge the two files into one 'Knowles-IGI' file. (These are only the records extracted from marriage or christenin...

After I had read most of the entries in this thread but not the one immediately above, I did a little testing with my copy of FTM 2006, and looked about in FH, and confirmed that while you can warn FH you will be entering dates in US mm/dd/yyyy format, on screen FH will show you the date as dd month...

My husband has a book on the famous (or infamous) New England Lowells which has a family tree in the back. We are trying to figure out if his branch of the Lowells meets up with theirs. I had started to put the family tree into my previous genealogy program but it proved to be too cumbersome. I shou...

Every now and again when I get stuck while doing research methodically, I do some wider 'one-name-study' searches to see what I can turn up. I am looking for ideas on how I can keep this information organized in case I need it later. (I usually keep it in a separate file until I have more evidence.)...

Certainly it would be better to ask on a Mac site, and I'm sure my friend will do so.

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.

Apparently installing the old program on the new computer is not an option -- as of OS X the operating system is quite different, and while some Macs had the ability to run the older programs, I'm told that the newest ones no longer have that feature. I suppose Reunion might be able to read his fath...

A friend of mine is preparing to help his dad move his files from FTM for Mac to a new computer, and is asking for advice. Presumably he is thinking he would export a GEDCOM which would then be read / imported by a more modern program such as Reunion. However, he is concerned about how much data mig...

Just wanted to post my latest mis-adventure in collecting software for use in doing Family History. A local newsstand carries the UK magazine Your Family Tree -- the copies sold here in the US all say Your Family History on the cover instead, but if one goes to the website and compares the content a...

The stats: 192 Megabytes Installed Memory I tend to work in several small files, with only the information I'm sure of kept in the 'master' file. My biggest FH file is 1763 KB, has fewer than 300 individuals, 110 sources. The biggest census JPEG is 1551KB and if the family is split across 2 pages I ...

In Peter Christian's book The Genealogist's Internet he mentioned one of the pay sites would let you search for all births registered by the same parents. I haven't tried this yet so I can't remember if it was FindMyPast.com or one of the others. If I can find my copy of the book I'll come back and ...

The other program I use that I would recommend to people is GenSmarts, which reads your GEDCOM file and looks for missing data, makes suggestions about what you might do to fill in the gaps and suggests places where that information might be found. It will sort your suggestions by Research Location ...

I'm in the same boat -- part of the territory, I think, when one is the youngest child. Most of the work I have done so far has been with researching my husband's family because that has been easier. On my father's side, both grandparents were dead before I was born, and it was only recently, when t...

Just wanted to report this one small glitch I am having while using Gedcom Census. Every now and again, when I attempt to link in images, I manage to lock up the whole works and lose all the data I have just entered. I suspect the problem is that I am trying to run too many things at once and I am r...

Very amusing reply, Nick! I should hope the default naming conventions of Gedcom Census suit you. :D Thanks to all for your comments. I would like to clarify a couple of points. The first is that the US Census sheets may have more families on them than the UK pages do, not to mention a large variety...

While at his sister's house, my husband scanned and saved a group of family photos with the program Paint Shop Pro in a format PSP called 'lossless jpeg'. He did this because we do not have Paint Shop Pro and he did not want to get stuck with a bunch of photos in a proprietary format. (We were takin...

Greetings all -- now that I have settled on Family Historian on my main program and discovered Nick Walker's superb Gedcom Census, I am reviewing my haphazardly-collected census images and looking for gaps in the collection. The Census spreadsheet downloads have also been very useful for sorting thi...