5 Questions with the DC Metro Rootsmagic User Group Leader, Dr. Margaret Ezell

Recently I asked Dr. Ezell to answer a few questions about her favorite genealogy software program, Rootsmagic.

 

1. Why should a genealogist use a genealogy software program?

My biggest reasons for using a genealogy software program are:

• Good software programs like RootsMagic make it easy to share information. Some also have iPad, or Smartphone versions.
• The mistakes in my database are my own, and all changes are mine.
• I decide when something is proven, when I have enough sources, and who is related to whom.

There are two types of genealogy/family history programs, those that run in the cloud and those that run on your home computer. Example programs on the Cloud are Ancestry, FindMyPast, and MyHeritage. They are easy to share with others. Example software program that run on your computer (PC or MAC) are RootsMagic, Legacy, Family Tree Heritage, Family Tree.

When I use collaborative online family trees, such as Family Search, other users can change the entries. Example: My great grandfather’s name was James Reeves Watson, the Clerk of Court in Claiborne Parish, LA. Every document we have has his full name. One of my unknown relatives decided to wipe out his full name and put in just JR Watson. I had to go back into FamilySearch and put in his full name, documented. He could have had a nickname of JR, but my mother at 99 had never heard her grandfather called that. She had been very close to him.

The same thing happens when you use any of the online program and you don’t make your file PRIVATE! But you don’t want to make it private so you can find new relatives and researchers. That is the oxymoron for researchers! So have your own copy offline!

 

2. What genealogy software programs have you used?

RootsMagic (several versions including the latest: RootsMagic 7). It works with Windows 10, 8, 7, 2000, and Mac OS X

Broderbund Family Tree Maker

Legacy

PAF (Personal Ancestral File), which is no longer supported by FamilySearch as of JULY 15, 2013.

 

3. Why do you recommend using RootsMagic?

It works/synchs/searches/imports directly with FamilySearch and soon it will with Ancestry.

Later this year, RootsMagic users will have access to Ancestry’s huge collections of records and members’ trees. With this new association, comes the ability to use the hints (Shaky Leaves). This will be in addition to the Hints from FamilySearch and MyHeritage.

 

4. Is there a great feature of RootsMagic that people should be using and don’t?

There are several that I love besides the HINTS:

Color Coding people and lines. You can use the color coding to highlight those who want work on or highlight you problem people for whom you need more documentation.

Switching Views from Pedigree to Family to Descendants to People, WebSearch, Timeline.

 

 

5. How can participating in a user group help a genealogist?

You can ask your specific questions or ask for a demonstration from other members. A current example topic is: Help for moving data from Family Tree Maker to RootsMagic.

Each month our RootsMagic User Group tries to have a lesson of some type. Researchers new to RootsMagic 7 may have challenges learning how to enter source citations into RootsMagic, so I thought I would show how I enter a new source and then create a citation, with the Evidence Explained source templates, and with a free-form template (in a later post in this series).This past month we were going through lesson on Creating Source Citations in Rootsmagic 7 from Randy Seaver’s Blog at Genea-Musings. You can view these blog posts here.

 

About the Metro DC Rootsmagic User Group

The Metro DC RootsMagic User Group meets at Washington DC Family History the 2nd Saturday of each month at 9:30 a.m. except when major Genealogy Conference are the same weekend. Everyone is invited to attend.  After the RootsMagic / Ancestry announcement there have been a lot of new users, so we have gone back to a lot of the basics at the meetings.  We have a free-for-all question session after the lesson.

 

Margaret P. Ezell, Ph.D.

 

As far back as Margaret Ezell can remember, she was taken to research libraries, courthouses, and to visit family members to gather family history information. Margaret’s mother, Mildred Ezell – (who died in 2015 at 99 yrs. and 10 days) became a genealogy enthusiast more than 63 years ago. Margaret remembers at about age 9, going to courthouses in Georgia and South Carolina. “There was one bare 40-watt bulb dangling from the ceiling, damp walls, boxes of stinky old records, and bug parts in the basement room where Mom copied records (no Xerox machines then). We took our own lightbulb -100-watt. Mom had me copy records until lunchtime when the movie matinee opened and I ran like the wind to get out of the courthouse.”

Having stood with her Mother for 3 days at the copier straight at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Wilson Library Manuscript Room, she is now glad to have so many digitized online records. Her computer skills were used to train her Mom to use the computer at 70 years of age. She wrote more than 15 genealogy books that Margaret edited, formatted and prepared the text and photos for camera-ready copy for publishing. The books are all on her family – mainly southern roots – Corry, Brodnax, Watson, Cain, Seab, Swint. She and her Mom submitted over seven (7) thousand records to the FamilySearch.

Margaret has a Ph.D. from Michigan State University in Family Finance and has worked in the financial and information technology arenas for over 15 years. Margaret is a Seneca Stake Family History Consultant and one of the founders of the DC Metro RootsMagic User Group which meets the 2nd Saturday of every month at the DC Family History Cente

Google is shutting down Picasa

Google is shutting down Picasa in favor of Google Photos

Yesterday Google announced that it is shutting down Picasa in favor of Google Photos.
Standby, the changes will begin starting May 1, 2016.

Here are your options:

1) Login to Google Photos and your pictures will be there.

2) If you do not want to use Google Photos, there will be a new place created for you to access your Picasa Web Albums data. You can view/delete/download your albums from this new place, but you will not be able to create/organize/edit your albums. That means you will still be able to access them, but you cannot manipulate them.

For those using the Desktop Picasa application, it will no longer be supported after March 15, 2016. That means it will still work on your desktop, but the program will not be updated in the future.

You can read the announcement at:
http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-picasa.html

Reprieve of Family Tree Maker and More

Ancestry.com made an exciting announcement of interest to Family Tree Maker and RootsMagic alike.

1) Family Tree Make will live on! Software MacKiev, the six-year developer of Family Tree Maker, will be taking the software line into the future on both Mac and PC platforms.

2) By the end of 2016, Rootsmagic will be able to connect Ancestry.com for hints and searches. You will also be able to sync your tree on Ancestry.com with your desktop RootsMagic program.

To read more:

New Family Tree Maker Options

RootsMagic and Ancestry: Working Together at Last

5 NARA Resources for WWI Research

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has many resources for you to research context for your WWI ancestors. Some of them are online.

1. This is the place for you to begin researching NARA’s World War I Records. This page also includes links to the digitized versions of some of the most requested historical documents.

 

 

2. Read an article in NARA’s Prologue magazine about finding your WWI Army ancestors. They Answered the Call, Military Service in the United States Army During World War I, 1917-1919 by Mitchell Yockelson in Prologue Fall 1998, Vol. 30, No. 3.

 

 

3. If your ancestor was in The Spruce Production Division, gathering trees for building airplanes, you can learn more about it in GENEALOGY NOTES: THE ARMY in THE WOODS, Records Recount Work of World War I Soldiers In Harvesting Spruce Trees for Airplanes By Kathleen Crosman.

 

4. Learn about how NARA is preserving movies about the Great War is discussed in Saving the Moving Images of World War I (Fall 2014) – The National Archives preservation staff is digitizing World War I motion pictures.

 

5. Now that you know about NARA preserving the WWI films, you can check out the digitized films from World War I and World War II on YouTube

 

 

 

After Ancestry.com retires Family Tree Maker

By now you may have heard that Ancestry.com is retiring the Family Tree Maker (FTM) software line. Ancestry.com cites the diminishing desktop application market as the reason to retire the software. That can be translated as the software group is not profitable enough for them.

If you are like me, you have seen the usefulness of having an online tree at Ancestry.com. You might have searched for new records from the tree. You might have followed the hint leaves. You also might have attached the records and other media (e.g. pictures and stories) you find by merging them into the profiles of people on that online tree. The more detailed those profiles are, the better the quality of the records that Ancestry.com suggests. Ancestry.com made it so useful and so convenient.

So far, the only method download the tree complete with the attached records and media was to synchronize it to FTM using the TreeSync™ feature.

When you download an online tree, it is packaged as a GEDCOM with citations, but not with the attached records or media. This is done by selecting the “View Tree Settings”, then in the Manage your tree section, click on “Export Tree”. Then you would need to download the actual records individually. Of course, you can always download the individual records one at a time independently of the online tree, and add them to a family tree on your computer.

What we know:

• Ancestry.com will not sell Family Tree Maker 2014 after 31 December 2015.
• FTM will be supported until at least 1 January 2017.
• Currently, no other family tree software has the ability to synchronize (sync) with the Ancestry.com online trees

Read about it on the Ancestry.com blog: http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2015/12/08/ancestry-to-retire-family-tree-maker-software/

Here are some options for Family Tree Maker users:

• Call Ancestry.com and let them know what you think. 1-800-ANCESTRY.
• Investigate other family tree software companies. Each of these has a basic free version.
  • Rootsmagic has made a page with a transition plan: http://blog.rootsmagic.com/?p=2546
  • Legacy Family Tree can be found at: http://www.legacyfamilytree.com
  • You can sync your online tree at MyHeritage to a desktop program using their Family Tree Builder software: https://www.myheritage.com/family-tree-builder

The big questions yet to be resolved:

• Will Ancestry.com online tree users be able to download the media attached to their trees after 1 January 2017?
• Will Ancestry.com allow other companies to interface with the online trees to sync with other programs?

If were thinking of getting FamilyTreeMaker, it is only available as a download. It costs $69.99 and can be found at: http://www.ancestry.com/cs/apps/P-5194. If you have a previous version, you can upgrade for $48.99: http://www.ancestry.com/cs/apps/P-5195.

My history with FTM goes back to the Broderbund version of it in the late 1990s. After some experimentation, I moved on to Rootsmagic. However, I had been seriously considered buying FTM 2014 to sync with the online tree. Even though I have been keeping online trees at Ancestry.com, I have always kept a family tree with photos and other documents on my home computer in a desktop program.

 

Five Questions with Artist Barbara Talbott

You might recognize these images from A Week of Genealogy’s Facebook page. They were so interesting that I asked the artist, Barbara Talbot to share some information about them.

 

Images ©2015 Barbara Talbott, used with permission

 

1. Your photography is a great way to display family heirlooms. How did you come to take these photos?

I was working on my body of work, Tarnish, and a friend mentioned she had some pieces of vintage silver I could shoot for my show. When I went to her house to shoot the pieces, they were too contemporary for my work but I shot everything anyway. As I was working we talked about how she was trying to figure out how to display the silver since it was so tarnished and we came up with the idea of creating a wall of prints to hang over her buffet.

 

2. How did you make the items come to life?

The whole Tarnish body of work was actually an accident. I had these pieces and photographed them to create some etchings. When I opened them in Photoshop and started working with them, all these gorgeous colors came out and I loved the look of them. I worked on the original images for two years before I showed them to anyone. I rework the images to bring out all the color and texture.

 

3. What recommendations do you have for a genealogist who wants to photograph family items?

Metal objects are tricky. There are lots of reflections that tarnish and patina disguise. The best light comes from Windows and natural light. Use broad sources so the light can wrap around the objects. Place them on a fairly plain surface, an old damask table cloth or a dark oak table. The item should be the star. You can add props, fresh fruit in a bowl, napkins, but keep them subtle. You don’t want to hide the piece, just add a little color. Of course you can always find a professional photographer as well.

 

4. How do you recommend framing photos of family items?

In the case of my friend, she went to antique stores and second hand stores and bought frames. We laid out the frames and determined the design for her wall. We scaled the prints to fit the frames and she had them assembled at a framing shop.

 

 

5. Where can people see your work?

In December, I has a piece at the Circle Gallery in Annapolis and at Montpelier art center both. You can see my solo show coming up in February at a restaurant in Laurel called Olive on Main.

Barbara’s work can also be found at her website bjtalbott.com.

 
 
Barbara Talbott is a computer illustrator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and a Resident Artist at Montpelier Art Center, Laurel, Maryland. Barbara has been making things since she was a child. She attended MICA, Maryland Institute College of Art. She was at MICA, she studied the textural works of Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, and Frank Stella. The way these artists handled materials and created work so tactile made a distinct impression. It is the need to replicate the texture and surface of life that propels her to discover new ways to use materials and processes in everything she makes. After 30 years as an advertising photographer, graphic designer and computer illustrator, Barbara brings this experience into her work.