I’ve been using both Family Tree Maker (FTM) and Personal Ancestral File (PAF). I bought the “deluxe” version of FTM and found it to be a waste of money. The software is fine but the database CDs are junk. Don’t buy any of their CDs. If you feel an overwhelming urge to look at them, join a genealogy club that has bought a set and use those. The genealogy club is much more worth while and probably will cost less. I will admit that this viewpoint is based on searching through only one CD, the Canadian CD that comes with the Canadian deluxe edition. I managed to find one single entry that looks like it just might be an older brother of one of my many early Canadian immigrant ancestors. I could only make this surmise since I already had all the information that the CD could supply. The most frustrating part of this is that the source cited on the CD is completely beyond my reach. It is an old atlas that probably resides in one or two major Canadian libraries or archives and without access to that source, the CD is just an index entry. Maybe some of the other CDs would be more valuable, but I don’t have the money to buy them and search through them. I have a membership in the National Genealogy Society and use their library as well as the Library of Congress. I have found these to be useful and valuable. I recently joined the gene society in the town where I grew up in California and I hope to get access to local newspaper archives on microfilm via inter–library loan and learn more about my early California pioneer great grandparents. There are wonderful sources that have masses of information on my early Canadian ancestors, but you can’t buy them from a commercial genealogy publisher. Finding the best sources is most of the battle in solving the genealogy puzzle. The broad scatter shot approach just wastes a lot of time and money. I don’t have much of either.
PAF is free from the Mormon web site, www.familysearch.com. I bought FTM for the scanning and image storage. That was another waste of time and money. It “works” but I now use Adobe Photo Shop and Jasc Paint Shop Pro for scanning and working with images and store my images as ordinary files. FTM won’t permit pictures stored in its database to be exported and the viewing options are very limited.* PAF has a very simple feature to display images stored outside its database in disk files. The images can be organized and displayed through PAF without filling the gene database or locking the images away in a proprietary database.
One interesting side light on the image storage and use issue is that the same instance of an image stored on a hard drive can be accessed and displayed by either PAF or Internet browser. In each the image is referenced by its location on the hard drive. This permits the image to be stored once and be used in many places. I like this much better than the FTM method of locking the image away.
Currently I am using HTML, DHTML, JavaScript, etc. to create scrapbooks. I have them now on a web site at RootsWeb with links to a RootsWeb WorldConnect GEDCOM database. This is working great. I can put a separate link on each individual in a picture to their page in the gene database. I can also include links to pages in any web site on the Internet so that the entire structure works as a single entity. This organization is the inverse of the FTM database. In FTM (or any other gene program) you first navigate through the gene heirarchy to the individual and then access the scrapbook for that person. With my method you navigate to the family and follow the narration and links from the top down to the individual. I like my way better. Ideally one should be able to navigate from both directions, which should be possible with web technology. The missing piece right now is the gene database portion. This I will have to code to replace the RootsWeb WorldConnect web gene database.
As an aside right here, it is possible to put links into your gene database and have them appear in the RootsWeb WorldConnect display as hyperlinks. This should work with any gene program including FTM. The link is included in the “Notes” area in HTML hyperlink format. This is then exported in a gedcom that is then loaded to RootsWeb WorldConnect. The HTML hyperlink appears in the RootsWeb display as a web hyperlink. The problem I have with this is the use of the “Notes” section. I use this area for notes (I wonder why) and I don’t want these loaded onto RootsWeb for all the world to see. The real answer is to make provision within the gene program to include HTML. In fact the inclusion of an HTML wysiwyg editor wouldn’t be a bad idea for creating documents in the scrapbook and in the “event denoted biographies” that I suggest down below. I personally use an ascii text editor rather than an HTML wysiwyg editor for the same reason I drive a stick shift. I get more control. It is possible for the gene program vendor to permit the use of any editor as long as the result is web browser compliant. The editor choice would be one of the preference options that the user sets.
My gene database has over 7,000 individuals that take about 2 meg of space. With a few dozen images in the database it is nearly 50 megs which makes moving it around and doing off line backup a chore. Since the scrapbook where the images are stored uses object embedding, you can store almost anything that supports this technology in the FTM scrapbook including MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. documents that can be displayed and edited with the click of a mouse. Unfortunately they don’t print in the scrapbook and have to be printed one at a time using the native software of the object. Another gotcha.
PAF doesn’t have object embedding but it has almost unlimited space for text in the note, source citation, etc. elements. FTM has limits on the amount of text you can put in these elements that I hit almost on day one. I have names that are to long to fit the FTM space reserved for people’s names. Again, PAF is better here.
Also, PAF has a unique and uniquely useful feature for doing gene splicing. You can filter your database in limitless ways to create export GEDCOM files. No other gene program approaches this feature in PAF. PAF does a much better job at importing and merging GEDCOMs. There just seems to be more control over the results. Also, if you are merging LDS GEDCOMs, the AFN merge is fool proof.
Now, FTM does have some nice features. The global change is real nifty. I’ve been able to standardize place names and such in a few minutes with this feature. The family page display beats PAF. But FTM spreads an individual’s data across several windows and makes the PAF single window for all information on an individual look pretty good. FTM lets me put in multiple instances of information and check off the preferred item. This is great when you have several sources with conflicting birth dates for example and want to keep each and a citation for the source. In PAF you can put the alternates in the source citation but this is not part of the standard display of information for an individual and can thus get lost.
Well, I bought and paid for FTM and like the user interface and will continue with it for now even though they come out with a “new version” every six months and charge you $20 for it. That means it will cost you $40 per year to use FTM. Doesn’t say that on the box does it? I do like the user interface and the graphic reports. I have seen a package that will do these for PAF for a price, but I haven’t tried it.
Right now I am using FTM for my main storage and display and PAF for gene splicing. I export from FTM, import to PAF and filter the database and export what I want. Also, I load foreign GEDCOMs into PAF first and filter out bits and pieces that I then import and merge into my FTM database.
Merging external GEDCOMs is an absolute pain in the neck with FTM. Each merge creates a new instance of all the sources in the GEDCOM. The result is multiple instances of a master source each absolutely identical down to the last jot. There is no individual source merge function in FTM similar to that for individuals. There is a complicated work around using the mass merge feature in FTM. This is such a pest of a process that it may be easier to key in the information than to merge an external GEDCOM. Speaking of the mass merge feature, it is safe enough as you are prompted for each pair of individuals. However, you can not mark the pair so they won’t appear on a subsequent merge. I have hundreds of individuals appearing on the potential merge list and I won’t be going through this list every time I append or merge another GEDCOM. Each time I run this, I want only those individuals that have been added or changed since the last time I ran the merge plus their prospective matches. Finally, I don’t understand why I’m not allowed to merge multiple sources or individuals. If I can have a pair of duplicates, I certainly can have N–tuples of duplicates. Finally, out of the hundreds of prospective duplicate individuals that I have, I can not find any that are in fact duplicates which makes the merge report useless.
My next gotcha concerns FTM’s “Facts.” I’ve created some new fact identifiers. This is a nice feature. Now I want to merge some of these together. I made a mistake and want to fix it. There is no explicit way to do this. There appears to be an implicit way to do this as on occasion when I have entered the wrong identifier and then try to change it I have been prompted with the question as to whether I want the change applied to all matching fact identifiers. I wish I could do this explicitly as the prompt just doesn’t seem to appear when I really want it to appear.
Another problem with fact identifiers is the token generated for them in a GEDCOM. Some of the tokens are rejected by PAF and I expect they will be rejected by other gene programs as well. What is interesting about these errant tokens is that they originated in PAF and were accepted by FTM. Since they are custom identifiers in the first place, I should be able to pick whatever token I want as the GEDCOM will contain a definition for the fact token and the accompanying mnemonic identifier. I seem to be stuck with these things and I can’t get them to export properly.
Given some of these problems with sources and identifiers, why don’t I export to a GEDCOM edit the GEDCOM and re–import the corrected information? An ASCII text editor and short learning curve would probably do the trick. Obviously I thought of this. The issue is the scrapbook. That does not export. I will never find all the images and Word objects I have in my file and get that all sorted out again. FTM has me now. I’m the pig in the bacon and egg breakfast. And, as noted, the word processing software documents imbedded in the scrapbook don’t print as part of the scrapbook.
I have gone through the process and fixed the problems in the GEDCOM. This first example is a new “fact” that does import.
I’ve now automated the process of fixing the problems in the FTM gedcom with the following Vedit macro.
Now that you mention printing the scrapbook, I have no intention of ever printing the scrapbook. What a waste of paper. I do intend to publish, but on CD in a form that can be navigated and viewed just like FTM or PAF navigates and views. I have a CD that another researcher did using Shareware. I wish I had seen that before starting with FTM. Some of those web sites that accept GEDCOM do a creditable job. I want to be able to give a CD to someone with all the software and data on the CD. This should be read only and provide all the navigation and ad hoc reporting that a quality gene program would provide, but without the ability to update.
If all the free form text being entered into FTM is in HTML format, it is not a great plunge to see the way to write an utility to export the entire FTM database in HTML to include scrapbook, images, and data (and the “Event” descriptions described next) as a fully formatted web site. This would satisfy the requirement for a read only publication on CD that anyone with a web browser could navigate.
A nice improvement to FTM would be an expansion of the “Fact” page. I would first change the name to “Event.” Then I would provide for a formatted text “chapter” attached to each event. The page should have the word processing and formatting capabilities of at least Microsoft Wordpad and permit an unlimited amount of text and imbedded images and graphics. This could be done by using HTML as the standard and permitting the user to supply an editor to create the text and HTML formatting as described above. Each event would be a “chapter” in the individual’s biography and can be included in an FTM “book.” Obviously this could greatly increase the number of custom “facts.“ It would permit the removal of biographical material from the “Notes” text area and would reduce or eliminate the need to imbed this information as wp documents in the scrapbook.
Ordering “facts”, or “events” as I would like them termed, seems arbitrary. It would be a very unusual event that did not have a date of occurance. It would be even more unusual for a researcher to know all the dates. Obviously, sorting by date makes the most sense. However, sorting events arbitrarily does not make sense. The method used to order siblings would work very well with events. One has the choice of sorting siblings by birth date or arbitrarily arranging their order. I want the same flexibility for events. By the way, the sibling ordering process is very useful. I put the individual in the main line of descent at the top of each list and can then move down the generations quickly by clicking on the first child tab on each family page. Using the same standard for any potentially date ordered list would make a lot of sense to me.
Another thought, I could look at the FTM database and figure out how it works. This is possible. I am an experienced DP type who once read IBM MVS hex dumps like most people read the daily paper. I have deciphered more complex structures than I expect FTM has created. I’m an experienced C programmer and have a copy of MS Visual C++. I could write some utilities to do some of the stuff I’ve suggested and sell them through Tucows for $19.95. I wonder?
At some point, if FTM doesn’t create a vast qualitative improvement, I will probably switch to PAF or some other entity for the reasons cited.