Family tree software search

Hi Charlotte,

Have you seen this discussion?

Ultimately it will depend on how you want to use it, what data/records you want to store, and what reports you'd like to view or print.

Its a personal choice.

 

A "synced" or synchronised tree with FTM 2012 can be public or private, see other discussions on the forum re: public vs private trees. You are in full control of this. Having an internet link means you can have the program auto search for you this makes finding new sources of information dramatically easier although of course you need to check the sources and not just rely on other information but the fact that you can get automatic searches of military, parish, overseas, transportation, medical, school etc records many of which you'd probably not think to search should surely make your research easier?

There are of course plenty of out of date programs out there many of which are so old they pre-date the popular use of the internet and will last a short while with no support and no clear upgrade path. So you can easily go for an older option if you don't mind your research taking a lot longer and risk having the tree stranded in an old unsupported version of a program.

Almost all programs these days will use the internet to assist speeding your research. Using an ancient version of a program might seem like a good idea to avoid the internet but comes with the potential of a whole lot of incompatibility problems for the future.

 

Regardless of which FHS you use, it makes good sense to keep them in a different file.

 

It depends Tim for the purpose stated, ie: to assist friends yes keeping them in a second tree is probably good idea. However if you suspect a connection at all eg: they come from the same area or you are doing a one name study or one place study then having separate files isn't a good idea. I'm doing a one name study and I've lost count of the number of times small snippets of unrelated people will join up.

I have about 8000 people in my tree and around half are for the one name study yet very recently I was able to add a twig of about 15 people to my own tree when I finally discovered the father of a Bisset was actually a husband of someone of my line. Since they were in the same tree I spotted this straight away if it had been in a different file I'd not have spotted the link.

 

You're not wrong in what you say Alexander, but I was commenting wrt the statement about trees for friends. Obviously if you are doing a ONS then it makes sense to be in one tree. Has FTA helped you to identify some possible duplicates?

 

You may recall during beta I mentioned that I was adding in negative scores and the ability to filter out inaccurate duplicates as otherwise it wouldn't be that useful to someone with an ONS. Now that I can flag duplicates that I know aren't duplicates it keeps the report clean. I've not been able to find any genuine duplicates yet though.