My goodness I accomplished a bunch last weekend with that hour of extra time! I’m taking the advice I preach and cleaned out my emails, making sure that I saved everything that was important to my desk top and if it was super important, to the Cloud. I use the free Dropbox. For information that may someday be important, I save the link to an Excel file I keep in Dropbox. For example, if there is a particularly interesting blog about clues from old photographs from Ancestor Cloud or Genealogy in Time Magazine, I copy the link in the Excel spreadsheet. One column is Topic, next is the link and the third is comments, if any. That way, if I ever have a brick wall or a client comes to me with a difficult quest with an area where I’m not an expert, I can quickly find useful information.
One email I had received from last month was for a special on Roots Magic. For my faithful readers, you know I dearly miss the simplicity of the old PAF that Family Search once provided for free. I switched to Family Tree Maker when PAF was dying and was happy until it stopped synching with my Ancestry.com tree. The many calls and emails I made between both organizations were pointless so I gave up and went to the Standard free version of Legacy. I liked it so much several months later I bought the Deluxe version. IMHO, Legacy has the BEST charts of any genealogy software product out there and is a bargain for the price. But back to the Roots Magic email, there was a special offer for $29.95. I thought I could do better so I hunted around and found I could get it for $20.00, along with an instructional ebook. I decided to make the purchase, download my GEDcom from Ancestry and upload to Roots Magic in preparation for when Ancestry.com and Roots Magic are able to synch like Family Tree Maker failed to do. I got my $20.00 price from the Association of Professional Genealogists but I also found it by looking for special offers. Here’s the link if you’d like to purchase it – ROOTS MAGIC SPECIAL.
Another special for the upcoming weekend – November 12-13 – is Arkivdigital will be free for everyone. If you have Swedish family it’s a must use. Yes, the records are in Swedish but there are helpful hints on their site or you could use Google Translate. Happy Hunting! Now back to Roots Magic…
I was pleased with how quick the upload was; Legacy takes a whole lot longer. After updating both Legacy and installing Roots Magic, I saved to the Cloud and to a stand alone hard drive as I am paranoid to lose the information.
While I was doing that, Hubby was working at his desk beside me. I looked over and what did I see but visions of holiday shopping appearing on his screen! So I gave him my gift list for this year – a new sewing box and three genealogy books. I did have to have him log onto my National Genealogical Society account to get a discount on the books but that was a good savings, too.
All that took up my extra hour but I felt so good about cleaning up my data I decided to move on to finishing the Canvas project I started in the summer. I’m just about done with our family poster. I think it’s a bargain for $34.95. Granted, I’m going to have to get it framed.
Haven’t checked out how to make one? If you click on EXTRAS on the Ancestry ribbon and then click on the drop down menu for Photo Books and Posters you leave Ancestry and go to MY CANVAS. To make a poster, click on their ribbon FAMILY HISTORY. You can import your Ancestry.com tree to their template and get creative from there. It’s an awesome holiday gift.
If only I could have an extra hour every weekend!