Upgrade

First of all, if you want to read a very brief summary of my Church’s history with family history software (from my point of view), check it out in the Book of Jeffrey. In short, as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ, I’m encouraged to use a family history application on my own computer, be that the Church’s own Personal Ancestral File (which is free to cheap, but has now spent several years languishing) or some other, third party product. Well, let’s face it: all things being equal, free is always better than not free.

Based on that concept, I’ve spent the last several years, limping along with PAF 2.3.1. With the advent of Mac OS X v.10.5 Leopard, the Classic environment was completely abandoned, which made things even worse: I had to transfer the application to another computer running an older OS that does support Classic, then access it via Screen Sharing. So here are the steps I have now:

• My main computer, a Power Macintosh G5 named Anila, requests a screen sharing session with my iTunes server, a Power Macintosh G3 named Negri.
• Negri launches the Classic environment.
• Negri asks to share FilesRAID, a mirrored RAID stored in Anila. 
• Negri opens PAF 2.3.1 in Mac OS X v.10.4’s Classic environment.
• PAF 2.3.1 opens a database from FilesRAID.

In short, Negri’s not tremendously fast to begin with, and with all this networking going back and forth, it’s a slooooow process. For this reason, most of my work, as of late, has actually been done on New FamilySearch (see the Book of Jeffrey post, above) rather than use the slow and annoying system I have here.

And it’s time for that to stop.

For the last few months, I’ve been going back and forth between a few different family history applications. The four that I in any way considered are as follows:

• iFamily for Leopard
• MacFamilyTree 6
• Personal Ancestral File 5
• Reunion 9

So what have I decided? Well, with all the other typing, I guess you’ll just have to wait till tomorrow! :-P