Genealogy Technology – Weekly Prompt #14

My first Weekly Genealogy Prompt post! Thomas at GeneaBloggers sends us each weekly prompt, chosen from Amy’s We Tree blog topic list!

Prompt #14 asks us to talk about the technology used in our genealogy research.

• First and foremost, I’d like to thank my MacBook for allowing me to perform family history research so beautifully. It’s such a joy to take it into an archive and enter sourced information directly. The days of tedious note-taking and transcribing is (mostly) over.
• For organizing my family trees, I use Reunion 9 for the Mac. Prior to my the switch to Mac, I used Family Tree Maker for about nine years.
• This WordPress blog is the new home of my personal genealogy research. Even though I know my way around building websites, I can relax with WordPress and only worry about content, not the code.
• I interact with other family historians on Twitter and Facebook.
• MacSpeech Dictate allows me to blog freely without unnecessary RSI pain. Through a headset, it converts my voice into text onto any of my Mac applications, including directly into WordPress. I’d truly be distraught without it! I haven’t dared bringing it into a genealogy library yet!
• Pages by iWork helps me create professional looking reports and documents.
• I’d be lost without TomTom, the portable satellite navigation system. TomTom has guided us on several genealogy research trips in the US and Europe.
• I’ve been a full subscriber of Ancestry since 1999.
• I’m also a big fan of The National Archives Documents Online, Origins Network and Rootschat (all UK).
• All of my RSS feeds come through NetNewsWire. There’s no way I’d have time to visit all the great genealogy blogs and genealogy news sites out there, or remember where they were, but with RSS I can keep up with everything. So much is happening in US genealogy these days and I’m struggling to keep up with it all!
• iPhoto stores my photos but I’ve yet to come up with a meaningful tagging system.
• The Nikon D40 (now old technology!) takes amazing photos. Now I just need to revisit every cemetery and 2003’s family reunion again….

Technologies I wish to embrace more fully are:

• Footnote — I’ve recently rediscovered it and I’m loving it!
• An iPhone. I need to buy one first though. But first I think I need to get my US credit history active again since it’s contract only!
• I had TNG: The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding on a previous website I started in 2004. If I find the time, I’d like to use it again.
• Handheld voice recorder … got it, don’t utilize it.

When I began researching my family tree 10 years ago, the technology was very crude. A handful of websites, mailing lists/ forums and a meager selection of subscription sites. It’s so much better now!