GEDCOM Files: Mac – PC

Note: This is a very long article. If your not doing a frequent exchange of GEDCOM files with other people, or you don’t have any problems when you do so, you should probably skip this. This grew out of a problem I had with a relative. We did much of what was listed below, until we were comfortable in knowing what the problems were on both sides, and how to work around them.

If your having problems with GEDCOM files, going between Macs and PCs (even Macs to Macs or PCs to PCs), there are a few things you can do:

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Backing up your data

There is an article on Random Genealogy about backing up your genealogy data and making sure it’s some place safe, in light of the recent hurricane. They were referencing another article about documents you should backup.

It made me stop and think, because I do have a lot of one-off things from the family (photos, documents, etc.), that if something happened to my house, we would lose a lot of the family history.

I’ve made copies of my data in the past and given them to others, but I will be doing a comprehensive backup this week and putting it somewhere safe (and away from me).

FileMaker 8 and FileMaker Pro 8 Advanced

Quite a few Mac users who rely on FileMaker for tracking their genealogy information and research might be interested in FileMaker 8, which is now available.

FileMaker Pro 8 and FileMaker Pro 8 Advanced

Dennis Sellers has a good write-up about it at Macsimum News

Update: MacFamilyTree 4.1.7

MacFamilyTree 4.1.7 is now available from OnlyMac Software.

Update/Fixes:

* Fixed a bug causing all information concerning relations to disappear.
* Descriptions for relations are displayed in the views and in the html export.

Jreepad 1.4.1

Jreepad 1.4.1 has been released. Jreepad is a open-source Java-based personal database. Version 1.4.1 adds some interface improvements.

Requires: Java 1.4 or later (if you’ve run Software Udpate in the past 8 months or so, you should be okay). It is available as a Mac OS X application bundle.

screenshots.

Main features:

* A Jreepad file consists of a nice simple tree structure, and each “node” has an associated “article” – this can be plain text, HTML or tabular data.
* Nodes can be rearranged very intuitively with drag-and-drop functionality (or by keyboard), so it’s easy to arrange your thoughts.
* There’s a very powerful and intuitive search facility to locate a piece of text in a subtree.
* Hyperlink support: select a link and you can follow it – whether it’s HTTP, FTP, mailto:, “node://” (as used in Treepad), or even WikiStyleLinks!
* Integrated Google search
* Load/save Treepad (.HJT) files, compatible with Treepad Lite (so you can share files with Windows users)

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