Decisions

"New Family Search" has broken many of our individual work-flows for managing data collected during research. Everyone who is doing family history is doing research. You might be talking to a relative who shares some family information such as a birth date of a child or you are at Ancestry.com reviewing a census. What do you do with the this new information? In the past you would of entered the information in PAF (Personal Ancestral File) or some similar software. You might have printed a hard copy of the census information and filed for later reference. Then a couple of years ago New Family Search came on the scene. If you are like me, I didn't want to double enter the data in both PAF and New Family Search. So I quite using PAF for a while. This was a mistake. There is a lot of information that I didn't agree with on New Family Search. It didn't invalidate the ordinance but seemed messy. Also New Family Search was not a place to archive my research notes, digital document, photos or correspondences. It was not unusual for me to have New Family Search, Ancestry.Com, Rootsweb, cyndislist.com, and PAF all open at one time. I would be cutting and pasting information from one program or site to another. The data is always in fields and is not efficient for cutting and pasting. New Family Search was helping me to not redo ordinances that were already completed but had bogged down my data entry and broken my work-flow for organizing my collected data.

I think the pain that New Family Search created in my life might just be worth it with the recent announcement of Certified Products for new.FamilySearch.org. These products are revolutionizing my work-flow for saving, updating and synchronizing my data with New Family Search and other data repositories. Many of my frustrations have or are disappearing. Go to the link below to view the latest Certified products. It includes programs, services, and utilities that are compatible with new.FamilySearch.org (Family Tree) and conform to FamilySearch standards and systems.

http://www.familysearch.org/eng/affiliates/index.html

Over the weeks to come I will be posting reviews of some of the software listed. Mike Dahle and I have been trying them and we will share our findings. The reviews will be in the tab above called "Software Review".

Below is a hand out from today's Family History Class. It is a simplistic view of a work-flow that that goes from research to completing an ordinance. I have also started an "Issues" column that contains questions that I ponder. Please review and give me you comments or additions. I plan on expanding and modifying this work-flow and I would enjoy your input. If it is too small for you to read just double click on the image and it will open in a new window and you can enlarge or print it. I will begin to share the answers that I have discovered during my search for a better work-flow over the coming weeks.