If you own or use genealogy database CDs and family Tree Maker software I want to alert you to some potential concerns about the next version of FTM software leaving out CD-ROM support.

I was initially excited about the new Family Tree Maker beta. I rely heavily on FTM for research on Ancestry.com and to maintain my research. On initial look the new sfotware update is a much more than them  minor revisions of the last few versions. It’s a total re-write of the software with a more web based (and Ancestry.com oriented) approach that could really make this an even more useful tool.

But now I’m pretty angry to find that support for reading data CD-ROMs is being dropped from the new FTM.

If you own Family Archive Cds and use family Tree Maker it’s important that you check out the FTM 2008 beta quickly and send feedback to the beta feedback email address. And do it quickly, or you’ll find yourself left out and unable to use your Cds in the future versions of FTM.

There is a discussion group unrelated to the authors of the program where people are discussing teh beta that also may interest you. The list is run by users and intended to cover more geenral technical issues with the software than just the curernt beta release. But this also seems to be the only place where there is a public discussion of the changes we see in the software.  See the FTM-Tech mailing list for more info and discussions of the software, but be aware that the best place to send feedback about the beta is to the beta email address.

There is a free piece of software, the Family Archive Viewer, which allows you to read the CDs, but it doens’t allow you to update info from them into a GEDCOM database. For years the software vendors selling the CDs have encouraged use of Family Tree Maker because it expands the usefulness of the CDs.

So now, after buying FTM because of these recommendations, and being a customer for years who has purchased upgrade 3 times in the last 4 years or so, and after investing hundreds of dollars in reference CD-ROMs — I discovered the next upgrade will obsolete any ability to work directly with thee CDs to insert data into my research.

Stranger still, the parent company that develops the software still sells the database CDs at their Ancestry web store.

It’s not clear if the motivation is just that they are too lazy to provide backwards compatibility in this re-write of why they decided it was ok to leave this out.
The ability to save files readable by previous versions of the software is another complaint on the beta discussion board, FTM-tech, on rootsweb.com. and users such as myself are unable to import some old databases, and there seems to be much debate of handlnig of sources text fields.

It seems likely that this discontinued CD support is motivated by the desire to get customers to subscribe to Ancestry.com instead of buying CDs.

The online databases are great, and Ancestry has become a fairly essential research tool. But I’ve been advised that I will just need to keep an old version of the software if I want to use CDs with my database (and then I can’t write data back and forth between the two easily, apparently). And that just bothers the heck out of me.

I noticed this a few days ago and now found an official announcement at the Google Books Search Blog with the catchy title:

Greater access to public domain works for all users

If you hadn’t already noticed, Google Books is a treasure chest of useful info for genealogy research. There is literally a flood of books coming online on a regular basis, fully text searchable. Many of these are books now in the public domain that have sat in libraries untouched for years. Many of these fully searchable books may not be the kind of book think of for genealogy research, and that makes this all the more valuable as a tool for finding facts in unusual places.

Until now, even if a book was in the public domain you couldn’t do more at Google Books than read it online or download a PDF file. I’ve spent hours trying to re-type text or extract it via OCR for my genealogy research.

Now they’ve added a feature that is designed to make the material more accessible for handicapped users who use text readers. This also makes the material more accessible for use on the Web, in school reports, and for saving text from books into your genealogy program.

I found a useful article at a “how-to” wiki site on an unusual but noble idea — How to Restore an Abandoned Cemetery. Also linked from this page is another article on Visit Old Gravesites for Research Purposes.

A few of my ancestors are buried at old cemeteries that were abandoned or no longer have churches associated with them. One appears to have been well maintained for decades, apparently by another church that took over responsibility for it. Another one was apparently overgrown for years until recovered within the last decade or two. At least one of my ancestors is buried in a small family graveyard that is now on an old farm.

Near where I love is an old cemetery overgrown by woods, tucked away next to a restaurant and off a busy road. I’d noticed it many times and thought about visiting but never got around to it until one foggy morning that I thought would be a good day to take my dog for a walk and to take some photographs.

It turned out to be the perfect day for this — the light fog and drizzling rain added such a mood, and the cemetery seemed quite unusual because of the old trees growing throughout the cemetery, often from old graves.

So I took some moody photographs and posted them to a web page. Some readers there told me a bit more about the history of the place. Apparently this cemetery was long abandoned until a clean up effort about a decade ago. The graves were mostly from an era just after the Civil War and and most belonged to freed slaves and their children. One friend told me she knew the place and found it creepy. I fond it relaxing and had a good feeling from paying my respects to those buried there.