GJohn

My ancestors consist of several lines from Germanic states, plus Irish & Scot-Irish lines, and a bit of yet unidentified European mutt. All lines were 19th century immigrants eventually ending up in Kansas City area or western Kansas. Today's descendants primary scattered across central US in flyover country.

I frequently exchange research finds with two of my older siblings, but we are not yet working together collaboratively.

- One sibling for decades has recorded family info on paper in files and folders, interviews, family events, photos, newspaper clipping, library research, free web, etc. She likes working old-school and has hand-generated some fabulous family story documents, but is lacking good source tracking or easy data exchange.

- The other sibling's interest is recent, spurred by AncestryDNA, enjoys the fun of research discovery, uses online Ancestry.com trees, just learning the importance of recording data sources, not thrilled by access fee $$$ amount size.

Professionally I am an experienced electrical computer engineer & software programmer in aerospace & more, self-employed contractor. Hey RM management, need another programmer to get RM8 out the door?

Personally I currently have notable family care obligations and other family & farm obligations.

My genealogical research activity time is primarily dictated by career and family obligations, usually periods of intense research, followed by longer droughts while research sits idle.

Genealogy research experience: Started in 1980s, shareware -> homegrown GEDCOM S/W -> DOS PAF -> FTM -> TMG -> RM7. Early on I learned lots of bad data entry habits, especially with FTM; likewise poor source citations. TMG is where I learned genealogy research standards & good habits. I have learned to regret my early 'sins' because after multiple imports & data merges, I am now paying because my data requires cleanup of every individual and re-verification of every source & citation. When TMG was discontinued, I was discouraged & discontinued my research to see if it would be resurrected. Recently I have been inspired to resumed activities with vigor and selected RM7 as the vehicle.

Using RM7 for about 1/4 of my near 1500 individuals, so far I have cleaned up data fragments and re-verified citations or added missing citations, then added the any obvious new info from easy free web sources. After the cleanup phase, will fully exploit the many web resources not available just a few years ago. My long term plan from TMG is still to publish family history book(s) using Narrative Reports as the basis. Love many aspects of RM7, but I find the GUI inefficient for the sort of work I am currently doing (always opening and closing windows).

My hopes and aspirations for RM8 is improved GUI efficiency for data entry and citing sources, improved Narrative Reports and Sentence Template Language features.