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make family tree in Visio - manually or automated via db?

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tomos:
From there you can edit entries, print reports, etc to get a feel for it - it's a pretty easy program to get around in without having to resort to the docs.
-4wd (January 10, 2009, 08:54 PM)
--- End quote ---

thanks again for all your help 4wd :up:

sword:
I found it necessary to keep simple charts about family groups away from the process of entering information. I think you would find MS Publisher or WordPerfect easier to use than MS Word for charting. Horizontal charts with each generation on a separate level are fine for small numbers of people but vertical formats, where each newer generation is indented and on a new line, is better for anything over three or four hundred. 
It might save you a lot of time to try to see if you have any distant cousins who have done work on your family. See the Rootsweb Surname List or Ancestry - WorldConnect or the LDS Family History Centers or a local genealogy society in your area. The folks at the LDS were the most help in my early efforts. A good numbering and file system is worthwhile.

raybeere:
I just spotted this thread. As a former professional genealogist, I have to make several points here. First, you will nearly always regret it if you fail to use software designed for genealogy to save a family tree. There are programs that print nice charts, there are programs that do a lot of neat stuff. Mostly commercial, but worth it. When you have to change something, you'll regret it if you've set up your own kludgy solution. You might as well try to maintain a 10,000 record plus database in a word processor.

It is also very easy to forget to cite your sources. You need to note exactly where each bit of information came from. Why? Three reasons. First, if you don't know where it came from, you can't judge how reliable it really is. Second, when some bit of conflicting information comes up, and you aren't sure if you copied a date wrong, or whatever, you - or someone else later - is sure to want to be able to find whatever you did, and they'll curse you if they have to hunt all over for it. Third, when you - or someone else later - suspects that you didn't notice all the clues, and there might be the answer to that question you've never been able to answer - they're going to want to find the source you used. If you are enough of a novice at genealogy to be using anything other than a genealogy program - you did miss clues. (No insult intended: this is like saying, if you're still using Dreamweaver to design a web site, you're not going to teach HTML to a guy who uses Notepad++ for his site.)

Finally: GEDCOM. This is not clearly understood. There is a standard for data exchange, but it is flawed. Very flawed. No program can import all data from another program without messing some things up. Some programs can't import their own exported data without messing things up. I know. I've tested them... Find a program you will be happy using - take the time to do your research. You really don't want to have to migrate all that data - even with GEDCOM, you're looking at weeks of manually fixing all the little errors in the new file. My personal favourite is The Master Genealogist (TMG). It is slightly pricey, but highly customisable. Some don't like it due to a steep learning curve, but I think folks on DC can handle it. :) Then again, if your preferences run differently, I've heard good things about GenBox. Stay away from the 'consumer' titles - they are all junk. Just a few years ago, I had at least six genealogy programs on my machine at once, in case a client used this or that format, and tested them all. There was another fairly good option at one time, but it is no longer available. >:(

David1904:
I also use The Master Genealogist. It is comprehensive and feature laden - in fact I don't use anywhere near all its capability. I will one day when I have more time …
Another program it might be worth looking at is GenoPro. For the money it has a lot of features and seems to handle importing GEDCOM files quite well. It is good for a visual browse around a list of people most of whom are confirmed as "in your tree" plus a host of others who might be - but as yet you haven't nailed down the precise connections. I once realised there was a connection with another family through one of my paternal great grandmothers family when I had actually been looking for a connection through a paternal great grandfather.
The program can be found here GenoPro

David

Nod5:
This is great! :) Informed answers just keep coming in this thread. :Thmbsup:

@raybeere: ok, I hear you. I WILL move to some sort of database software. I guess it is my general hesitance towards becoming locked into this or that format that has stopped me so far (and the fact that there seems to be a lot not so good genealogy programs around too). But given at least partial interoperability through GEDCOM then that shouldn't be such a big worry. I have cleaned up my large .txt file by now so that some of it will probably also be possible to autoimport (I'ts only a matter of getting some thorny regexp stuff just right). I don't have time to do it now but I'll make an attempt later this spring.

I have been very careful with sources. Here in Sweden the church records for almost every part of the country are available through online subscription services that have high resolution color photos of every page, usually dating back to somewhere around the year 1700. It is amazingly convenient. Maybe something similar is available in other countries? Anyway, I've written down exact references and have also screenshots of the actual church book pages. One thing I've learned the hard way is the importance of taking notes of what you DON'T find i.e. what texts you have searched and found no matches in.

@4WD: the screenshots from Personal Ancestral File looks impressive! Great with many output formats. That said, the Pedigree chart has the same drawback that most examples of such chart/tree outputs from tools like these that I've seen: it is too spaced. I want to cram as much as possible of the tree onto one sheet of paper. In my manual, Visio made tree I could squeeze in 11 generations on one sheet of paper (I've trimmed away a lot of people on the "sides" to make that fit).

So, in the end I will probably BOTH keep that manual tree manually updated AND migrate the data into some real genealogy software database. The manual "main tree" won't have so many details anyway and so it will not need updating so often. Just name and date of birth/death/marriage and lines to mark relations. Please keep the discussion on pros and cons of various software solutions flowing!

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