* GenSmarts

[CurtisB48]

Has anybody used this software in conjunction with Family Historian?

I have borrowed a book written by Stella Colwell from my local library which includes information about GenSmarts software "Use GenSmart in association with Family Tree Maker. This program analyses your loaded files too, and suggests research avenues, together with a list of sources and lists"

This program apparently works with a number of genealogy programs and before I consider downloading it I would be interested to here any views and comments about it.

Brian

[PeterR]

I've no personal experience of GenSmarts but I note that there are some 30 other postings which mention it, when I entered it in the Search box at the top.

[tatewise]

I have not used GenSmarts before, but I have just experimented with the trial download.
It does not support Family Historian specifically, but loaded an FM GEDCOM with 500 Individuals via the GEDCOM option with no trouble.

It seems to have a few neat features, and the To Do List tab looks particularly useful.
However, the actually Online Search it submitted was not as clever as I had expected.

There is a missing Death Source and Place for William Ayton who Died After 1930.
GedSmarts chose and Estimated Place of London.
However, the search submitted to FindMyPast used Surname = Ayton and from 1928 to 1932 in all countries and all districts.
His Forename was not used, the estimated Place was not used, and After was not used.

[CurtisB48]

Peter & Mike. Thanks for your replies.

Peter, I had a look at the 30 postings you mentioned, as expected there seems to be varied opinions about GenSmarts.

Mike, I appreciate the time you have taken to download the trial version and as usual your comments are very useful. After reading through the various posts identified by Peter it seems that it will come down to personal preferences, therefore, I will download the trial version and experiment to see if it suits my requirements.

Brian

[jmurphy]

Hello, Brian --

I was one of the people posting in the earlier discussion of GenSmarts. The program is both useful and infuriating in a 'not the way I would have designed it' way. As others determined, there are problems with the way GenSmarts works with GEDCOM files, as opposed to the proprietary file formats... or perhaps the program is just as buggy with the other formats, too, only we don't see that because we aren't using them.

The thing I found most intriguing is the 'sandbox' feature which allows the user to add in his/her own recordsets (e.g. if you purchase data on a CD-ROM). Theoretically if I buy something which concerns Devon in a particular time period, GenSmarts is supposed to remind me to check that recordset against the people in my GEDCOM who overlap in time and place.

GenSmarts does make some really stupid suggestions, but it's possible to say "that suggestion is ridiculous because of [fill in the reason why]" and rule those out, and figure out a better search strategy. That reflex comes in handy later when looking at stupid Ancestry hints.

So I highly recommend that people take advantage of the free trial to see where the balance of annoyance/utility lies.

[CurtisB48]

Jane?

Thanks for your reply, I propose to download GenSmarts in the next few days to see how it works hoping it will provide me with to do hints.

[jmurphy]

I've recently reinstalled FH and some of my other genealogy software on a new computer. Rather than trying to pick up with old backups, I'm starting from scratch with FH 5.0 and entering the data in a clean database. Some of the time, when I'm deciding what to enter next, I fire up GenSmarts to see what suggestions it makes.

So here are my impressions of the morning.

The idea behind GenSmarts is that it is like having a second person to look over your data and catch things that you have missed. One of the things I like to tell my friends that are intimidated by computers is they are very fast, but also very literal, and so they can seem a little bit stupid. GenSmarts is a great example of this because some of the suggestions it makes for things to look at next can be ridiculous. However, if you take this into account and use the GenSmarts prompt as a nudge to do what you know is better, you can still get the same use out of the program that the programmers intended.

For example: take the case of one of my husband's g-grandmothers, who was born in Germany. GenSmarts is suggesting that I check for birth records in the US for her. This seems ridiculous, and yet I did find her birth date in a set of records for the town in New England in which she lived. Why? Because some industrious souls had compiled the information found on memorial inscriptions in the cemeteries, and since her date of birth fell within the range of the collection, her data is in there! But even if the search had come up empty, the suggestion could have been a reminder: I know she was not born in the US because her daughter's obituary said that the family came to the US when she (daughter) was a young girl; I have census records showing her as being born in Germany, and so on. Thus before ticking the IGNORE button in GenSmarts, I could add "look for passenger lists" and "look for birth records in Germany" to my Research Plan.

One of the things that I think will prove useful as I review my previous searches is the research locations tab. If you are going to a particular research location, it allows you to print out a To Do list customize for that particular repository. If I choose "Ancestry.com" I get a list of the suggestions that should be things I can find at Ancestry. If I want to go over all the people in the file who might have a record in a particular collection, GenSmarts has them all listed. I could build a query in Family Historian to tell me which individuals are of the right date range, of course, but this provides a cross-check. It allows you to mark which websites you have a current subscription for, and flags free/paid sites, so if you use certain websites at a library, you can pull up all those suggestions and run through the list while you are there. You can also see how many suggestions are piling up for sites you don't currently pay for, which might help when deciding whether it's worthwhile to buy PPV credits or a short-term subscription.

Like many US-based products, it is probably much more useful to people doing research in USA records rather than the UK, but it does look at 1901Censusonline, 1911Census.co.uk, Ancestry, FindMyPast, National Archives UK, National Archives IE, and Scotlands People.

The Data Cleanup feature is another one which could be done in FH with a query; right now my list is showing all the birth and death events in my file for which no place was provided, but when I used it before, I remember that it showed all the places which had the US City, State format with no county name.

There is a setting under Tools / Customize Records that used to allow you to launch another program from within GenSmarts with the selected person pre-loaded. It says "If you'd like a "double click" of a suggestion, or a press of a button to take some action on a suggestion, you can specify that here. " Theoretically one could send information to GenQuery this way, but this may not be available in Windows since Vista.

So part of the utility of the program, or annoyance with the program, lies in whether you like the user interface of GenSmarts when using it as a cleanup tool. My preference is to use extra tools (I also have Louis Kessler's software Behold!, which I got a while ago when it was cheaper; it displays the contents of your GEDCOM file in human-readable English) from time to time; I find it easier to catch some proofreading-type errors outside of Family Historian, simply because the other programs force me to look at the data in a different environment.

I bought it very early in my research; it did prompt me to look for some records in FreeBMD which I hadn't found yet, and I was happy to find those records, so I don't regret spending the money. But once you move beyond the beginner stage, I think you have to use the suggestions as a prompt for more advanced action -- they are too limited to simply take at face value. If you actively use the suggestions as a jumping-off point to clarify your own thinking about how you know what you know, then the program can still have some value.