Technology is Supposed to Make Your Life Easier, Isn't it??

The holiday season has now officially passed, and Voila! I have become a procrastinator. I have been putting off writing this, the first blog of the new year. Normally I would have posted sooner, but I find myself holding back--possibly because of several frustrating developments  in the last couple of days. All have to do with new technology.

I have reached a point in my genealogy research where I must consolidate my data and upgrade to a new system.

My personal genealogy website, Betty's Boneyard,  was written on software that is now twelve years old (!).  I must face the fact that a new website eventually must be built--probably sooner rather than later!  Yet I seriously don't want to let go of the old website.  However,  if I wait any longer, I will reach a point where the old Mac operating system will be completely obsolete, and I won't be able to update the website at all.  So a decision must be made.

Also, I have been happily using Mac Family Tree for several years now to upload my family trees onto Rootsweb, but about a week ago, one of my trees crashed completely when I tried to upload it to the website. The tree contained over 2000 individuals. Luckily, I was able to retrieve the data (thank goodness I backed it up last fall!).

After this little escapade,  I made the decision to purchase Family Tree Maker for Mac.  Now that all of my trees are posted on Ancestry.com, the ability  to sync my desktop back-up trees to my Ancestry trees was VERY appealing.  So I went ahead and made the jump.

I will review Family Tree Maker for Mac in a subsequent blogpost, after I've had the chance to get used to it, and explore its features.

Right now I'm just trying to make sure that my Ancestry trees download correctly in the Family Tree Maker program. Yes, I've had a few problems. My Ancestry trees are HUGE with many photos, census images and other documentation.  One of them took 3 hours to load.  One seemed to be missing images, and caused my Ancestry tree to lose some images too--which I was able to restore.  There also seem to be unexplained duplicate images in the Family Tree Maker trees, once they've downloaded.

And then came the  realization  that the notes in my Ancestry.com trees are over two years old, and not the same as the  updated notes in my Rootsweb trees, which contain transcribed wills, historical references, bios and other really cool info on my ancestors. So after I get all the trees successfully downloaded, I will be painstakingly copying the new notes to the Family Tree Maker trees.

Technology is supposed to make your life easier. Isn't it?

Happy New Year! Have a great day!

Betty

© Betty Tartas  2012