Feeling Sentimental About Software

Photo Collage by Midge Frazel

A long time ago, I attended a MacWorld Expo in Boston. It wasn't my first one but I don't know what year that was. Hubs drove me in to the Bayside Expo and dropped me off as he had a meeting to go to and could pick me up in the afternoon. I had a great time all by myself looking at the exhibits and taking in sessions. That's when going to a conference was a lot of fun. I rounded a corner and stopped dead. There was a booth for Reunion, a genealogy software program. I was a die-hard Mac user then and hadn't touched my genealogy notebooks in a long time. The kind salesman gave me a demo copy on a floppy disk and I spend a lot of time using it and thinking about genealogy. I was working so much then gaining a reputation as a person who taught educators how to use computers.

When I started to use Windows, I decided to buy Family Tree Maker for my Windows computer at Costco and kept the receipt to mark the occasion. 10-10-1998. I had Ancestry's first online database, Genealogy.com and then moved on to full Ancestry.com. 11 Feb 2001. I learned Personal Ancestral File (PAF) enough to teach beginners how to start their own pedigree chart and family group sheets.

I knew I needed a desktop software program to use for reports and to compare my many interrelated families. I looked for new possibilites and decided on RootsMagic and purchased version 4 on 25 April 2009. It was a wise decision as now I can also use it on my Mac laptop. Bruce is a brilliant programmer and takes suggestions and writes a dynamo manual. See this photo of me taken on vacation at Cape Cod with my RootsMagic 4 manual and my coffee? At the next NERGC, I was delighted to meet him and he gave me a new manual and signed it.

To be fair, I also use Legacy Family Tree and subscribe to their Webinars. Let's just say I love software. Always have and always will. A highly caffeinated genealogy needs coffee and software. 

I look forward to the next version of RootsMagic (and the manual) and will experiment with the syncing. I faithfully export a GEDCOM each month. I store all my citations offline. 

Feeling sentimental....