In the meantime I had to cope with new technologies and had to make myself computer literate. In 2006 I was introduced to information on the genealogies of old families in South Africa published in books by NA Coetzee and CC de Villiers and this boosted my thirst to the knowledge of my ancestors as well as those of my wife and her parents. Since my forced retirement in 1991, I started in 1993/4 collecting data of my family and predecessors and wrote it down by hand. I found MyHeritage the best and easiest of all of them. I tested many of them (Brother's Keeper, Geni, Family Tree, Family Tree Maker, Ancestral Quest etc.), but MyHeritage became my favourite very quickly. So I decided to find modern genealogy software, that should be the best surrogate for my favourite Generations Easy Tree and Easy Chart. Because Easy tree uses CE fonts for Slovenian letters with "roofs", gedcom exports produced false names, surnames or places etc. It was much more difficulties to make Easy Tree running on it as it was on Windows XP. In December 2013 my notebook totally crashed, so I bought another one - but this one has 64 bits platform. With some tricks Easy Tree and Easy Chart worked fine on it. The next one was notebook with Windows XP. In that time I had personal computer with Windows 98 with CE fonts. I started to discover my predecessors in 2000, when my cousin from the other part of the Earth gave me original package with Sierra's Generations Beginner's Edition 8.0 (Easy Tree and Easy Chart) and taught me in less than 1 hour, how to use it with efficiency. So far it looks as though it is all plain sailing, what happens when something goes wrong? Well, there is a fairly good FAQ section and if that does not sort. Various useful tools are included that allow you to run allsorts of reports on the data. Start by entering what you do know about your family and then before long you will start getting smart matches and your tree will grow. Very useful adjuncts are the Smart Matches where names in your tree are matched with similar families in other member's trees, and the Record Matches that match data in your tree with data in various family history repositotries, newspapers, immigration lists.Įntering data is simple and straightforward, almost totally intuitive. just click on the synch button in FTB and data that has changed since your last synch downloads from the net into your offline tree and then reloads your tree from FTB to the net with any changes you might have made to the offline version. The most recent version synchcronises between the online and offline trees. I have used MyHeritage for many years both the online family tree and the offline family tree builder affectionately known as FTB. A "Select All" facility would be a great bonus, but I'm hoping they're working on that at the moment :) I also wish that we didn't have to Accept or Reject each Smart Match individually. Hopefully this facility will be available at some stage. I tend to prefer the online site when making any updates or changes, but that doesn't pick up any errors I may make with dates, etc., so I need to re-sync with my Family Tree Builder every now and again. If I've had occasion to contact Customer Support at any time, they have replied within a day and have done their best to explain or fix any problems as swiftly and professionally as possible. I have the Premium Plus plan so have unlimited storage and that's great, because I can upload as many photos as I want, including birth and death certificates. The site is really user friendly and has additional features such as family statistics and being able to print your own chart. I have been a member of the My Heritage Site for over 3 years and have enjoyed every minute that I have spent 'growing' my family tree.
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