red paper boat

I have spent the entire day playing around with Family Historian. It is Just Fine. I even ran a few reports, to see how the source citations looked, and they are Just Fine, too. But, it’s still not the program I love with all my heart, and it is going to cost me $60 when the free trial is over.

Sooooo. I tried one last time to track down the problem with Cumberland Family Tree and Vista. Apparently, it’s something to do with CFT changing file names and Vista being a big meanypants about it. I found a message board post from the guy who wrote the program, written in early 2008, saying that he’d released an updated version for Vista. Huzzah! Except, he’s taken down his website and is no longer selling the program. But, I now had a reason to think that there might be a version out there, somewhere, that’d work. A couple of hours of trolling through message boards and I found a saintly soul who was hosting the new version on his own website

I win!

It took me all damned weekend, but I now have CFT back up and running. I feel like a three year old who just found her security blanket. Now I just have to get the back-up databases off my other machine.

Oh! I did actually get something accomplished, though. I found a bunch of census records for Esther’s family (1900-1930). Apparently they were living in Ohio in 1910. I had no idea! Asa’s mother, Emma, was supposedly born in Ohio, so that might help narrow down the search. Or it could just be a coincidence. I also found Asa’s family in the 1860-1880 census, living in Massachusetts. Still no trace of Robert Cooper, because it’s such a common name, and I don’t have a starting point. I expect I could get info on him from Ball State’s archives, though. Surely they’d know something about him, since they named a building after him!

And now, I’m going to go watch mindless teevee, eat ice cream, and maybe even have an adult beverage, because my brain has turned to mush.

Alas, my beloved, horribly out-of-date, and no longer updated genealogy program just plain will not work with Vista. It is for to weep. I spent a good chunk of last week and most of the weekend trying to find a reasonable alternative. The two most promising, My Heritage Family Tree Builder and Legacy both ended up being hugely disappointing.

MHFTB is clunky, ugly as hell, and in my opinion does not handle sources very well. Legacy was even worse. It was horribly un-intuitive, and worse, it’s source input menus kept leading me around in circles, until I wanted to cry. It’s worse than user-unfriendly, it’s actually user hostile. Oh, and it popped up a nag notice every time you tried to use a feature that is only available in the for-pay version. Why not just grey those options out, instead of making me click multiple times? What a pain in the ass! And no, I will not be upgrading to the full-featured. Why the hell would I want to give you money for making me cry?

So, I decided to try Family Historian. It’s kind of pricey (around US$60, I think), but the trial is full-featured. I’d much prefer a time limit than a feature limit. And the 30 days they give you is more than enough to give the software a good trial run. Which I’m doing right now. So far, so good. It seems to handle sources pretty well. It can actually copy events from one individual to another (yay!), and best of all, it works the way I think it should work.

There’s an FH upgrade planned for sometime this spring, but they are promising that anyone who buys now will be able to upgrade for free.

The other thing that is making me cry was that Firefox now seems unable to work with Ancestry.com’s proprietary image viewer. Ancestry has a work-around, but that only managed to crash Firefox. So I’m stuck using IE, which makes me feel like stabbing things with sharp, pointy objects. It’s not just my natural aversion to all things IE, either. The damned browser has security settings that require it to throw warning messages at you every time you try to view an image. And, as if that weren’t enough, when you try to save an image to a specific folder, it (un)helpfully overrides your decision, and puts it in a security threat folder. WTF?! And if you try to add Ancestry.com to IE’s trusted website list—in order to stop the insanity—it then starts popping open a whole new browser window every single time you click a hot link. That’s just plain not reasonable, when you’re doing a lot of searching.

I am doomed to be frustrated.