From FTM to Family Historian

Two things happened in August last year which prompted me to revisit this project:

  1. I received an email to upgrade to a new version of FTM by MacKiev. I orignally chose FTM after some careful research, mainly due to the existence of both a Mac and PC version but also that it was a fully fledged program, but now had reservations:
    • Lots of people complaining about the lack of support
    • Highly coupled integration with Ancestry and constant bugging to sign into Ancestry - great if you want all of that and have an account, but frustrating if you donā€™t
  2. The superb Forest of Dean Family History site had posted that they may take the site down, and I wanted to ensure I got all the data if that happened

Step up Family Historian

After watching a webinar from the Guild of One-Name studies, I decided to give Family Historian a try. It seemed to be the ā€œgo toā€ software for one name studies. I liked the clean interface. There was no Mac version which was the main drawback, but Iā€™d got into sync issues editing the same tree on different machines, so maybe that was for the best. They were also running a beta for their new version and I had to buy the current version to apply. (I bought FH6, applied for the beta but was refused, oh well.)

One of the reasons for originally choosing FTM were the videos on genealogytools.com on best practices for how to use it and how to record source citations properly. I made similar in roads in deciding how to use FH last year, but donā€™t seem to have made much of a note and now canā€™t really remember!

Snippets of memory

  • I watched a series of youtube videos by Theresa Kehoe about recording information on spreadsheets
  • I created a chrome plugin to scrape websites and grab all data for a particular surname
    • The plugin is called: GenIxScrape (on github)
    • This was based on an existing plugin called GenScrape
    • Using a plugin means not having to worry about authentication, since the web
  • How to use Ancestral Sources - Iā€™m sure I watched a great you tube video on this, and followed the exact methodolgy described, but canā€™t seem to find this now
  • Decided (once again) on how Source Citations should be recorded and whether to follow Method 1 or Method 2 (lumpers vs splitters). I know I found a really good article which explained someones approach, which I totally agreed with, but now canā€™t find where I recorded that link. I also think there was a great summary on FHUG website, but canā€™t seem to find that either
  • This was probably a time when I was (yet again) trying to decide what kind of notetaking / personal brain software to use and I expect these notes are buried in a lost section of one of those

Picking back up

  • Watched Guild 2018 webinar again and made notes
  • As per Paul Howe, decided to collate lists of data in spreadsheets to serve as checklists
  • Spreadsheet per source - Iā€™ve seen people collate a spreadsheet of Births for a number of different sources. I started doing this, but got rather obsessed with the differences between sources and never onto the constructing families. I found a spreadsheet called ā€œFURNEY - Birthsā€ but it only had the Forest of Dean baptisms, so rather confusing.
  • Donā€™t worry too much about the columns for the data, just make it appropriate to the source
  • Its so easy to grab all the Furneys from FreeBMD but then a lot of work to actually recontruct families. Also - what does that work entail exactly
  • Paul Howe mentioned collecting the following data for each person:
    • Name
    • Date and place of birth
    • Occupation
    • Date and place of residence (presumably multiple)

Source Citations

  • https://fhug.org.uk/kb/kb-article/getting-started/ - talks about the lumpers / splitters conundrum
  • https://fhug.org.uk/kb/kb-article/working-with-sources/

Places