PAF is dead!

I agree with Hugh, the ancestors of mac users have suffered long enough as a result of their progeny’s worship at the Shrine of Steve Jobs despite the constant reminders seen in every day life that he is the source of 34% of what ails this world …

Well this mac user’s ancestors have been taken care of quite nicely using Reunion for the Mac over the last 8 years. I wouldn’t recommend relying on NewFamilySearch’s online tree for genealogy. Anyone can come along and make changes to the data there. While the old information is preserved, it can still really be messed up, and I think it is wise to keep one’s own records where they can’t be changed. (In the two months that I’ve been on nfs, two different people unrelated to me have merged the information for an ancestor of theirs into the information of one of mine. One man had three hundred records merged together. It’s a real mess to straighten out.) But it is more fair now that both Windows and Mac users have to buy their own genealogy software.

One reason that you can’t download data easily, I think, is that the data is very messy there. Since every record ever submitted about a particular person is merged there, you could be downloading 5 – 15 variations of place of birth, or name, or date of birth, etc. You’d also be automatically downloading garbage guesses that others have made. (However that was pretty much what people did with ancestral file anyway.)

I think that it will get slightly better over time, but people will always be able to come along and change the data that is there. I live in the San Diego Temple district so was able to start on nfs at the end of November. As far as I know, it’s been the smaller temple districts that have gone online so far. None of Utah yet. But just in that time, I’ve had two people make major errors in my tree. For example disputing my great great grandparents’ marriage, which made all their children be marked as not being their children. Or another example, someone merged my great grandfather, with his 30 records that had been submitted, into her own great grandfather, who had a different name, birthdate and place, and death year and place. Her ancestor became the first record of the 31, which meant that to remove him, I would have remove 30 of my great grandfather’s records, then remerge them. In both cases I’ve contacted the person who did it, and that person said they didn’t know how to fix the error. I can’t remove a dispute that someone else made. So it’s frustrating. It’s an interesting tool, but I wouldn’t rely on it to keep my own records. A nice feature is that you can find the contact information for other people who are working on the same people as you, but the potential for things to get very messed up is high, and I decided that it’s really not something I want to spend much time on. I think that to uncombine those records for my great grandfather would take at least half an hour. So I submitted a report to the tech people asking for an easier way. It’s taken about three emails back and forth for them to quit sending me links to basic help documents and actually respond to the problem at hand. Also, another real annoyance for me is that there is a standardization feature for place names. That sound nice, but unless you override it, it cuts off important information such as the specific parish within a city for burials or christenings, and that’s very important for large cities. Also, it takes Danish spellings with letters like ø. å etc, and substitutes English letters. I’ve spent a lot of time getting the place names in my files right and want to keep them that way. I’m amazed that they didn’t use the correct place names– you can’t use any Danish databases if you don’t have the spelling right. I assume that other languages are treated the same way.