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By Claire, on July 27th, 2013
 Bird’s eye view of the city of Erie, Erie County, Pennsylvania 1870. Chicago Lithographing Co.(Library of Congress online map collection)
The Advanced Land Class at GRIP spent yesterday afternoon in the computer lab, and it was probably my favorite part of the week. Pam Sayre led 35 of us through the process of platting property on a historical map using the windows based DeedMapper software, by Direct Line. We practised on both the rectangular grids of Public Domain Land, and the more complicated metes and bounds of the 13 colonies. You can learn more about the software here.
The computer lab at La Roche is set up for 30, so some of us had to double up on computers. The room was also FREEZING so, for future reference, if you’re taking a course that will spend any time at all in the lab….bring a heavy sweater! Walking a (…more)
By Claire, on September 11th, 2012
 One of the things which drove me to create this blog was the desire to share my own research with others connected in some way with my British ancestors. Although I originally planned to upload static pages exported from my favorite genealogy software, Rootsmagic, I soon discovered a much more flexible and dynamic option – The Next Generation (TNG). With this software, I was able to upload my Rootsmagic gedcom file and the resulting database created a seemingly endless array of reports based on the user’s search filters.
I’ve been researching my family history for 30 years, so I had a lot of information to upload Then, I took the Boston University Online Genealogical Research course, and I learned all kinds of things that took my research to a new level: I learned there is a right way to cite; and I was introduced to good research techniques, standards, proof arguments, etc. (…more)
By Claire, on November 5th, 2011
 This month the focus of my ProGen study group is on building a personal genealogy library. My studymate Melinda was gracious enough to post her assignment early by way of a link to her online library catalog at LibraryThing.com and the rest of us are shamelessly borrowing her pretty marvelous find.
It goes without saying that, as a keeper of a blog, I LOVE the written word and, as an avid reader and writer, I’ve amassed, as I imagine a lot of bloggers have, quite a collection of books over the years. My house is bursting at the seams with books: many on overstuffed bookshelves; stacks balanced on spare chairs; the ever growing collection of must-reads on my night stand; lists of recommended titles I’d like to read but don’t own yet, tucked into my book club journal ; and bags in the garage, filled with books I’ve read but, for a variety of reasons, feel are (…more)
By Claire, on August 2nd, 2011
 I’m a diehard fan of Evernote, for all aspects of my life, not just genealogy notes, but I’ve been giving OneNote a serious look this week and I think it might be a real help in keeping my research organized.
OneNote is a program in the Microsoft Office family (I’m using 2007). The program allows you to create something akin to tabbed notebooks. Each notebook can have any number of tabs, or sections as they’re called. I decided to create a notebook for each family I’m researching. To keep things simple, and to maintain consistency, I created page templates for the different sections of my notebooks:
•Surname tab—Basically an overview of the family name, with general notes as well as a table of contents to get to the sections of the notebook quickly – essentially bookmarks which jump to a specific section, or a certain page (or even a paragraph) within (…more)
By Claire, on January 28th, 2011
 I have spent hours every day this week working on the assignments for my BU Genealogy class. Hours. Two days ago I had a panic filled moment when it seemed that my laptop had frozen, and I was reminded of the recent horror I’d lived through a couple months ago when the laptop’s hard drive went bad and I had to send it back to Best Buy for repairs. I hadn’t done a backup in several weeks (shame on me), but fortunately the clever boy at the Geek Squad counter was able to pull most everything off my partially ruined hard drive and put my most recent work onto a backup CD. Phew…..
When my laptop starting acting up this week, I put my class work aside, made sure my backups were all in order, and got myself a Dropbox account. People on the Android forums ( I have (…more)
By Claire, on October 16th, 2010
 I know a lot of family history hobbyists use Family Tree Maker, but I have been using Rootsmagic for some time now,and its recent update to release 4 is incredibly well done and worth a look. Thanks for Gedcom, it’s easy to switch between software packages.
Some of my favorite aspects of Rootsmagic 4 are the narrative reports, and automated publishing capabilities; the extensive source library which is extremely closely linked to Mills’ guidelines for genealogical citation; and the ease of uploading data to web pages. There is also and active and excellent help forum available to offer tips, help, and advice on how to make use of the update’s many features. Share:
You might also like:I’m Giving OneNote a TryI’m taking a look at LibraryThingLearning DeedMapper at GRIP 2013
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