All My Ancestors

I went looking for the daily blogging theme for Friday and apparently there are no prompts for Friday and Saturday.  Wouldn’t you know?  So I’ve had to come up with my own.

A few weeks ago my husband insisted on buying me a MacBook Pro.  I am conflicted.  I have been a PC user since the beginning–we had a personal computer very early.  I remember one I had had two pop-up disk drives on top.  All of my files, including my considerable genealogical materials, are all on my PC–both desktop and laptop. I bought Office for Mac since that will evidently allow me to use my documents and powerpoints, etc., ,etc.

But what am I going to do with my genealogy data?  Do I want to continue to try to use both platforms?  Reunion is the only genealogy software package I know of for Mac.  I did see one other program in the store last night but it didn’t seem like a good choice.  I know Reunion has been around awhile and is highly regarded by those who use it.  So I bit the bullet and bought it.

My thinking is that I will enter my husband’s line into this software.  I had his family info in some version of my TMG about 4 computers ago.  When his sister got interested in researching that line, I sort of stepped away from it.  And now who knows where the disks are that have his family data?  I know it was some of the first research I did so doing the data entry again will probably yield a much stronger database.  I still have all the documentation and I do have printouts from the original database so it won’t be like starting all over.  And I’m so disenchanted with what happens when trying to import data via gedcom, I wouldn’t try it even if it were a possibility.

Some of this decision is driven by the fact that Nathan Murphy has selected my husband’s immigrant ancestor to be part of his dissertation study of 100 prisoners sentenced to transportation to the colonies–I wrote about this possibility earlier.  I need to get the data I have into a better format to share.  I have a collateral relative’s application materials for the Sons of the American Revolution.  I scanned all that in using my new ScanSnap, which I love.  It scans both sides with one pass and the document feeder handles a stack of paper in about 3 minutes that would take 3 hours to scan one by one.  It’s truly amazing and I now have some hope for clearing my office of so many stacks.

But I digress.

So far, I’m struggling a bit with Reunion.  I can’t figure out how to make the source function work well and I MUST be sure to do a good job of entering that data.  I’ve worked with TMG and its predecessor for years and know how to make that work.  For some recent work for some clients, I’ve entered the data into Legacy and like working with their source templates.  I’ll keep reading and working at it.  I need a manual to have beside my computer as I work through the steps–there is help, of course, but no printed manual comes with the rather pricey program.

So let’s just say that Friday’s theme is Frustration.    I’ll keep you posted from time to time on my progress.