I hope the web isn't "the future," or at least not the entire future. We've already seen the conniptions that developers and users have suffered whilst trying to shoehorn their formats and data into Ancestry and Family Search. It would be far better IMO to have one's own flexible software so that formats and reports are obedient to one's own needs, wishes & designs.

Web data also presents issues of privacy, security and permanence which are not under users' control. Not for me, thank you.

Is there an SQL query that will add an empty birth event to any person who doesn't have one? That might be a handy addition to the RM tools.

Windows may have assigned a different drive letter to the pen drive in the other laptop(s). If you press Windows-key-X you can select "disk management" which will allow you to reset drive letters.The settings are usually persistent, but there are a variety of things which can make them change.

It's like Animal Farm: some jpgs are more equal than others. Try loading your recalcitrant jpg into an editor (perhaps Paint or Photoshop Elements) and save it out as a .jpg Try the saved file in RootsMagic. As Tom H suggested, .jpg files can be internally organized in several different ways.

Legacy may be good software, but it's failure to permit unicode characters is a deal breaker for me. I want Łódź, not Lódz.

Microsoft’s latest shenanigans show increasing abilities to reduce users’ control over their own machines and increased tendencies to do just that — recent alarming article in Forbes Magazine is making me think of moving away from Windows if the trends continue. Has anyone successfully run RootsMagic in a virtual machine under Linux?

I've been a RootsMagic user ever since Wholly Genes folded, but I haven't encountered any "meaningless promises." I agree that "confirming this is on the enhancement request list" is annoying.

I would prefer that the list of enhancement requests were posted, together with the number of users who would favor each. Family Historian does that; it makes one feel more a participant in the software's direction than a supplicant, begging at the gate.

If I may say so, I think it's an error to lay one's frustrations on the heads of small specialized software companies. I know nothing of the economics of software publishing, but it's clear that if one wants to hire a full-time programmer at, say, $50,000 per annum, that one has to sell 1000 copies of a $50 software package every year just to pay the programmer alone -- and one hasn't even begun to pay for overhead, taxes, food for the family, a roof over one's head, and the services of a charming and technically adept person who has to write "confirming this is on the enhancement request list" on the forum, probably more often than she cares to.

Instead of the period, would it be possible to use the old invisible non-breaking space? It may be Unicode (U+200B). I don't recollect the ASCII value, but I'm pretty sure there was one. This goes back to the glory days of WordPerfect.

Use the "sort date" feature on the edit person screen to establish a date one day after the birth event.

I have dozens,if not hundreds, of Ellis Island immigrants in my data. I list the place as New York City or New York, New York depending on how I want the narrative reports to read. As with Brooklyn, which once had a separate corporate existence, but is now a "borough," or Kings County, there's little chance that any ambiguity will muddy the fact of the actual location of an event.

When the Dodgers left in 1957, Brooklyn is the place where baseball in America died. I record it as "Brooklyn, New York."

Jerry mentioned the GedSite program. I use it myself. Its output can be as simple (and simple to make) or as elaborate as the user wishes. See www.gedsite.com which explains the program and provides links to sample sites.

In order to have the program run correctly from the external drive it would have to be installed in Windows anyway. Some program data (not your data) is held in the Windows registry and in C\Users\[your username]\Roaming. So you might as well have the program installed on your machines in its entirety and just move your data back and forth (or otherwise synchronize it).

Zhangrau is correct -- Windows is inflexible if it can't find what it expects.

There are some stand-alone programs (usually utilities like Autoruns.exe) which do not require Windows installation. RootsMagic to Go may partially do what you suggest (I'm not at all familiar with it), but I seem to remember that it doesn't provide the full RootsMagic facilities.

I seem to have  "description" in my fact list, but I don't recollect whether it was built in or if I made it as a custom fact. Either way, you could use it and edit the sentence template to suit the information you hope to record.

The template in my machine is "[person] was described as [Desc]< [Date]>< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>."

Will there be a demo or preview of Version 8?

What is a "convict ident?"

That's a great site, Jerry. It should appeal to the more serious and scrupulous genealogists among us. As you've seen, I went in a different direction, in part because I felt the site had to appeal to my more elderly users, many of whom were not as much interested in documents as they were in pictures and stories. Now I've gotten into the more elderly class myself I wonder if I made the right choice.

Very nice work! Please accept my congratulations.

Robert

Orthography was not a primary concern for the immigrant generations. Moreover, immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe had only had names on the Western pattern since 1800 or 1810 when the Tsar promulgated a decree requiring that they adopt them. The decree's purpose was to regularize tax collection and military conscription.

Before that decree most Jewish names within the Pale, except perhaps for the most prominent Rabbinic families, were of the form x ben y: Isaac, son of David, etc.

An important tradition of Jewish naming is that an infant not be named after a close living relative. Thus family names tend to skip a generation — children often named after deceased grandparents for example.

GedSite, to make presentation-grade websites, either for the net or for buring to CDs or flash drives. www.gedsite.com.

I too agree with Vyger's logic, but given that the user can set the sort date to the midpoint of two two end dates if desired, I wouldn't delay the release of RM8 by one microsecond for the proposed change.

Wherever the sort date is set, either by RM or by the user, the date itself will be displayed as entered.

In my own records (between 5800 and 5900 people, n=5851 ), a quick and dirty survey shows fewer than five "between x and y" sort dates which would materially affect the order of events in print reports or on my GedSite web site.

I've sometimes used "Psgr List" and "Psgr List (fam)" for this purpose. My memory has become so bad that I don't recollect whether that's a custom fact or if it was built-in.

The load on the CPU is sometimes very high when the computer is just booting up and for a few moments afterward. does the slowdown occur after the machine is up for a while as well as when you're just starting?

The Windows task manager can show you the percentages of CPU times that are used by each of the running processes.

If I'm not mistaken, one of our competitors publishes a lits showing how many of their users have asked for each particular change. One of that program's deficiencies IMO is the want of bold, italic & underlining in the printed reports. Last time I looked that enhancement was very high on the list of desirable changes. Were I using that program I would be confident that the programmers would be considering the change seriously.

I'd like to see the RM8 wish list similarly set up. Users would be given a greater sense of participation and I cannot see that the company would be risking anything by the disclosure of what users are hoping for.

>>>I believe you are refering to Famiy Historian<<<

Yes, of course. If their next version comes out soon and they have fixed that particular deficiency I'm going to have to make a difficult decision. The absence of italics, in particular, was a deal-breaker for me.

Is there a way to sort or change the order of items in the Media album?

Got it! Thanks so much.