Project Places started wonderfully.
[dropcap]I [/dropcap]was excited to clean up my place list in Family Tree Maker 2014 and geocode everything. I made allot of progress moving the parts of places that FTM said should be in the detail entry. Then I realized that FTM does not let you add Latitude and Longitude to every place. I was disheartened. My last straw with FTM was the realization that it does not like to play well with TNG, The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding. When exporting from FTM to Ged to TNG the media does not show up and place details show up as notes under the place.
If I were a member of Ancestry.com I may not have considered other software. Currently, the little green leaves mean nothing to me. I downloaded every genealogy program that had free or trial versions. I will always be an FTM girl at heart but did buy Legacy Family Tree. It will color code my family tree with the method I am using for my digital files and GeneLines and GeneSmarts then become options.
I have not read too many issues that TNG users have with importing and showing data, but place locations were mentioned. The downside is it’s hard to navigate and lacks the tools I love from FTM. There are tools in Legacy I enjoy and appreciate. I do not know the program well enough yet but the US County report and geolocation abilities are wonderful.
I am passionate about TNG.
I want to share and grow the data, stories and sources in my family. Redoing my older work and getting it up to GPS, The Genealogical Proof Standard, is important to me. To use TNG as a family repository I have to make it my primary database so I will try that while using Legacy for its reports and Family Search. I would use Legacy and upload to TNG as needed but every time it results in my family pages crawled by Goggle, leading to “Page not Found” errors.
TNG has a great option called Histories that I want to use. I would have to copy the histories back every time I uploaded a new gedcom. I would also need to stop linking to relatives in TNG from my Word Press posts.
That leaves me learning TNG as a primary database and Legacy as a tool and backup database while still tweaking TNG and WP. I may also take the opportunity to get and learn Evidentia, GeneLines and or Gensmarts. While I work on this Project Places is on hold. Once I am comfortable with both TNG and Legacy I will make a new game plan and go from there.
There is always good!
I am glad I decided to do Project Places. If I had not tried to organize the places I would not have discovered many of the issues until much later down the road. I would not have found Evidentia or purchased Legacy Family Tree. Frustrating as this situation is I know more good than bad resulted from Project Places. It still leaves the door open to revisit this project in the future.