My favourite reading over the past week has been "The Family Recorder", written by Audrey Collins of The National Archives (TNA):
- Saturday: a post about old houses in Fetter Lane. Fascinating for me because my 2x great grandfather, Julius William Fritz, lived in Fetter Lane from 1865 to 1887.
- Sunday: an excellent piece examining the new Family Search website from the point of view of British researchers.
- Monday: a beautifully drawn map of an enumerator's route, found amongst the 1861 census returns for Marylebone - to which a 20th century hand has added a stick figure saying "oh!" Since the stick figure is on the site of Lord's cricket ground, he really should be saying "howzat!".
- Tuesday: an introduction to Wordle.net, which generates amazing pictures from the most frequently used words in your blog.
Two weeks ago, Annie Barnes of www.hibbitt.org.uk left a comment on my post about Rev Frederick Davis. Last night I finally found time to check out her website - and what a treat it is. It has to be one of the best designed family history sites I've seen. I was so impressed that I searched the site to see what software she used - and so came across her Follow Friday post last week about GED-GEN.
GED-GEN is a program which creates family group sheets for your website from a GEDCOM file and is sophisticated enough to offer all sorts of customisations. I was so taken with Annie's site that I downloaded the free trial and, after a couple of hours playing with it, I bought the registered version. At only $20 I thought it a bargain. When registering my purchase I mentioned some trouble I was having with the non-standard GEDCOM file produced by Family Tree Maker 2011 and received an instant, helpful response from Mike Voisin of GED-GEN. I sent him my GEDCOM and he again responded very quickly and positively today. I am seriously impressed with both the program and the customer service. Thank you so much for the introduction, Annie.
Glad you found my post useful and thank you for your kind comments about my site. I'm looking forward to seeing your GED-GEN tree.
ReplyDeleteI like your writing style - '10 things my ancestors did to annoy me' really amused me.
Annie