FTAnalyzer - Are you using it yet?

Hi Gillian,

The above directions are for creating a custom Lost Cousin fact, and it doesn't require any census refs.

You create the above fact for people you have entered at Lost Cousins website. This allows FTA to understand who you've entered and removes them from Certain reports to then show you who you can enter at Lost Cousins.

 

The point is Chrissy that once done its done forever. It also means you can start to use the colour reports seeing who is missing a census entry, and who else you might add to Lost Cousins. Basically you enter some data it cleans up some data, you enter some more clean up more, and bit builds. Eventually you see hmm wonder why I've not searched for him/her on the 1881, I'm sure I'd searched for everyone.

 

Notes should transfer they just won't transfer as census facts just notes on the person. Different programs will have different degrees of success in transferring the data it really depends how well Reunion held close to the GEDCOM standard, if they were close to the standard then it should import just fine if they did things unusually you might have problems.

I'd agree that you want to try out software before you use it. There are a couple of key tests you should try. Firstly do you like the look of it? Try entering a test family with parents and grandparents and a few child branches off each, do you find it easy to navigate around? Can you easily enter information without a lot of typing? Does it have features you expect? Note most programs will have moved on from Reunion 4 which was likely to be fairly restricted in what it could do. So things are likely to be more graphical for instance and less text based. This first "am I comfortable" test will perhaps narrow down your selection. I did this a couple of years back and found some programs to be a bit too garish with overly large buttons for my taste. For instance I specifically detest programs that deviate from the windows standard and have unusual key combinations that are different from standard windows.

Secondly you need to make a list of the things that are important to you. eg: producing a book for sharing with family, charts, coping with large trees, ease of merging data from online sources, etc. Then make sure the program does what is most important to you.

Thirdly make sure that the program can import your tree without too many errors. Some programs will be stricter about things like invalid dates, although you may have already fixed them by using FTAnalyzer Some will not cope with any custom tags that Reunion has etc.

However one key thing is at the very very minimum make a backup of your tree both as a Reunion file and a GEDCOM file and copy it off the old PC so that if it does die you have all your research safely backed up.

I suggested the "am I comfortable" test first because if you aren't then it really doesn't matter how many bells and whistles the program has you will not be happy about your tree.