RootsMagic v4 (beta) - another thought

Playing around with the websearch feature......you know what would be really smart? Having the Google search string automatically look for females under their married name(s) as well as just their maiden name. The search string uses several "or" variations on the name to increase the chances of getting a hit, but it doesn't include the married name.

Cottesloe Beach

Yes, you read that right.....

There is a beach named Cottesloe Beach on the western coast of Australia near Perth. For the last few years, a sculpture exhibit has been staged on the beach in March. Coincidentally, my parents have just got back from a holiday in Perth and visited Cottesloe as this year's exhibit got underway, so here's two of their shots hot off the camera:



The Cottesloe district in Perth is named after Thomas Francis Fremantle who became the first Baron Cottesloe in 1874. He was indeed from Buckinghamshire, and was the big cheese in Swanbourne, 6 miles west of Wing and also within the old Cottesloe hundred.

Cyndi's List

My Wing website is now incorporated into the Buckinghamshire listings at Cyndi's List. I submitted the link on 13 March 2007 so it took two years, better than the four years that was being bandied around as the length of time it was taking to move up from the temporary new links page to the main listings.

RootsMagic and Family Historian

I currently use the free PAF software from FamilySearch.org. When I started out on this journey I wasn't quite sure exactly what I would want in genealogy software and I can be rather picky when it comes to software, so initially a freebie product was the smart choice.

I've never actually gotten around to moving on though! I've done the rounds of evaluating the various products out there a few times, the last time over a year ago when we moved to Vista Ultimate 64-bit, on which several products refused to install or run even when their vendors claimed they could! I came to the conclusion that I fancied Family Historian, a solid British-oriented program - but couldn't quite justify the price.

RootsMagic is currently offering their upcoming version 4 as a public beta operational to the end of this month, so I decided to take a look. It converted my PAF file without having to first export it to a GEDCOM, and seems to have a clean and efficient use of space in its user interface.

When viewing an individual there's a tab to run a websearch on that individual, with the search string optimised to increase your chances of getting a relevant hit - I will be looking at this a bit more to see exactly how optimised. I sent it looking for one of my COLES ancestors in Google, and hey presto it came back with a Methodist circuit baptism for his son, who shared the same name. Score! Then I sent it off to search Rootsweb and it came back with an Abney Park Cemetery burial entry for both father and son - I had known the son was buried there but not the father, my direct ancestor. Score! (Incidentally if anyone reading this is in London and fancies a trip to Abney Park see if they can find the memorials I'd love to hear from you) I was impressed at how quick and easy this feature was - slightly less impressed at the fact it seems to use the IE interface for the websearch, even though my computer is set to use Firefox as its default browser, but that's a minor quibble.

I was also pleased to see that the individual summary report doesn't abbreviate entries. PAF does this in order to fit any given field's contents into the space allowed in the report, leading to oddities like "Church St, W, B" printing as a residence instead of spelling out Wing Buckinghamshire in full - which, frankly, is pretty important information I want on my printouts! No problems with RootsMagic though, it will print the entire entry by scrolling onto a second line if it has to. On the negative side, the report starts a new page before beginning the source citations - why not have the option to run it directly after the main text of the report so you can save paper?

I do prefer a British-written program though, and here's an example why. RootsMagic has a gazetteer in it, which when you search for Wing will bring up both the Buckinghamshire and Rutland villages with that name - a good start. However, highlighting the Buckinghamshire entry and clicking Online Map sends you off to the LiveSearch Maps website which shows you the Rutland one, not the Bucks one. I had a similar false result when clicking on Great Tew, Oxfordshire (Great Tey Road in Colchester, Essex!). A UK-written program would be designed to integrate with UK resources and to pass instructions to those resources in a way that made sense for UK conditions. If software isn't optimised for UK genealogy I can guarantee there's going to be "features" which are either unusable or will annoy me every time I use the program, and I'm not prepared to pay for that.

I'll be downloading the demo of the next version of Family Historian once it comes out (also imminently) as a comparison.

Mapping Our Anzacs

The National Archives of Australia has been busy plotting their ANZAC military records on a world map by birthplace. I do love websites that don't insist on a surname and will let you just search by place, and drilling down on a map is a really fun way to do it! Sadly there's no-one born in Wing listed, but there are men from Stewkley, Wingrave, Linslade, Leighton Buzzard and Cheddington all serving in the Australian forces.

http://mappingouranzacs.naa.gov.au/default.aspx

WHITEwash

I spent some time this evening cross-checking two of my WHITE ancestors (from Dorset and London) from hard-copy paperwork to PAF file.

I do think I like the idea of filing paperwork that affects the whole family behind the family group report - this means less paper for a start as you don't duplicate census pages and the like. I am however updating each year's census event in each individual's PAF entry so that it has ALL the details from the census in the Comments field. In the past I hadn't recorded things like relationship to head of household but obviously this will make finding the census printout a bit quicker going forward as I will be able to guess which family group (eg as child, as parent, or as something else!) the page is filed behind.

Having reached Edmund Worledge WHITE (born 1845 in Corfe Castle, Dorset), I'm also taking the time to fill in some gaps, like the odd missing census entry I don't seem to have. I'm forcing myself to use Ancestry's new search engine to try and find them, rather than reverting back to the trusty old search engine. This is proving......challenging. Blogging about what you're doing rather than actually finishing trying to do it is never a good sign!

2 March In (My) History

Alfred and Medora BAKER's 13th child Hilda Florence was born in Wing on this day in 1892.

Also in Buckinghamshire, my 6xgreat-grandfather Joseph SIBLEY was baptised in Little Missenden on this day in 1742. St John The Baptist Church has surviving medieval wall paintings - we visited back in 2005:


And further afield in Ropley Hampshire, my 4xgreat-grandmother Elizabeth BUSS was also baptised on 2 March, this time in 1800.