Getting the most out of rootsmagic 55/2/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() For a history of PAF and Ancestral Quest, see the following links: Legacy Tree Genealogists for genealogy researchīill, that is correct.MyHeritage Subscription with Free Trial.Please click on the links in the articles or to the vendors below if you are purchasing products or DNA testing. This does NOT increase the price you pay but helps me to keep the lights on and this informational blog free for everyone. I receive a small contribution when you click on some of the links to vendors in my articles. I have changed the children’s birth orders in several families, edited a few things and now all I have to do is to keep myself from going back and looking at PAF, out of habit. Next, I printed RootsMagic for PAF Users which equates PAF functions to RootsMagic functions in the lingo of the PAF user, and went through this document step by step.Īll in all, less than an hour and I’m up and running and feeling confident. Thank goodness not many of my entries have problem lists, and the ones that do are short.īut hey, look, I’m already using two new features I didn’t have before. It told me I hadn’t added the sex for the child, and I hadn’t because I don’t know the sex of the child. Little triangles pop up, discretely, if there is something you need to look at. Well, it’s easy and intuitive now and I fixed it with ‘move up’ and ‘move down’ arrows. Yes, that could have been changed, but it wasn’t easy nor intuitive, so I never did. I discovered that my grandparents had a child that died, but when I added the child, PAF put them at the end of the list. I was very pleased to see that my all-caps first names for my direct line ancestors had come over as all-caps.Īnd guess what, the first I thing I see to do is something that has been bugging me forever. Here’s my first look at the equivalent screen in Rootsmagic. Now obviously I can’t check all 37,000+ records individually, but some of the larger ones are there and intact – all of the records I checked were fine. I imported my file into RootsMagic which took an amazingly short time, so short that I was sure there was a problem. I feel a bit guilty, like I’m abandoning an old friend or an old car that has served me so well for a very long time. So, here’s my last look at PAF on my computer. RootsMagic offers a “RootsMagic for PAF Users Guide” which made me feel better.RootsMagic felt very PAFlike to me in terms of screen layout and functions, just PAF on steroids.RootsMagic had everything that I wanted but without being overly complex, cluttered or busy.The reviews were unanimously and overwhelmingly positive for RootsMagic, with data bases far larger than mine with its 37,000+ records. Specifically, anyone with large notes files, if the entire notes file came over, or they lost data. I asked several people with large data bases if they had problems when they converted. ![]() I evaluated several software packages, but it came down to two, Legacy and its competitor, RootsMagic. We went on to become and remain very close friends. I just remember wondering if our unknown “cousinhood” was the reason we got along so well. I mean, you never know when you’re going to need to refer to your genealogy! If you think I’m kidding, I met one my closest cousins, Kathy, at a client site about 15 years ago (how can it have been that long?) completely by accident and yes, we compared our family trees on my laptop. Recently, I had a forced upgrade to Window 10 with the purchase of a new laptop, and I need my genealogy on my laptop. So, I’ve used it for the past 2+ years unsupported, but I know full well that with the advent of new operating systems, one day it’s not going to work anymore and I surely don’t want to have a crisis and have to adapt on top of a crisis situation. To me, software is only a tool and the tool I had was fine. I didn’t want to have to take the time to evaluate and learn anything else. When the Mormon Church discontinued support for PAF in 2013, I was greatly saddened, not because the software had been free and I was now going to have to purchase software, but because I knew that software so well and was so comfortable using it. I later discovered I should have been using source fields and such, but I’m not even sure there was a source field initially. I probably didn’t use it exactly correctly, because I typed everything into the notes field which was, thankfully, of unlimited size. It allowed me to organize my information. I worked in the computer industry and they wanted to see how this new-fangled computer software thing worked. When I first installed PAF back in the 1980s on my old CPM machine, everyone at the local Family History Center was cautiously curious.
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