The Gene Pool

When the family members are home for the holidays is the perfect time to accumulate and organize genealogy information. I’m the big family researcher, and I’ve got tons of papers, files, folders, photos, and documents. My grandmother left behind reams and reams of all the information she’d uncovered. I have slowly, over the course of five years, been going through it and trying to digitize it to share with everyone. It’s a long process.

I’ve tried a couple of geneaology programs– I even paid for one– but the one I’ve been happiest with is the free PAF, or Personal Ancestry File. There’s a new version out (5.2.18.0), which has multi-language capabilities, and even gives you the ability to download the stuff onto a PDA.

PAF is GEDCOM compatible– a must for any serious genealogy program. I’ve been pleased with PAF. I’ve been able to upload my PAF/GEDCOM files onto RootsWeb easily, too. You might like this if you are still pencilling things into charts and notebooks.