A few weeks ago, Personal Ancestry Writer II (PAWriter II) version 68 (Dated: 30 March 2007) was released. It’s a free Mac genealogy application (Mac OS X and MacOS 9) being developed by Howard Metcalfe, and was designed to have many of the same features found in the original Personal Ancestry File (PAF) .
Changes/Updates:
* The More Tag menu has been reorganized.
* LDS ordinances are now included. This is done in minimal fashion. LDS baptisms, endowments, sealings to parents and sealings of spouses are included. (Confirmations are treated as baptisms.)
* The only four items of information for each ordinance included are Status, Date, Temple Code and Place if Living. They are treated as plain text strings. Anything else still has to go into the notes.
* An LDS menu has been added. When you are in the main (navigation) window or in a Person window, you can choose to show an Ordinance window to add, edit or delete a baptism, an endowment and/or a sealing to parents. When you are in the main window or in a Family window, you can choose to show an Ordinance window to add, edit or delete a sealing of spouses. When you are in the main window, you can write a text file listing the TempleReady status of tagged people. There you can also tag people who already have any ordinances or have all ordinances. (People with some but not all ordinances entered can be found by tagging people with any ordinances and then excluding people with all ordinances.) You can also delete all ordinances.
* This means that an ANSEL GEDCOM file for submission to TempleReady can be generated. The only change is any ordinances you enter and your selection of people to be included. In the Submitter window you will be able to indicate that the GEDCOM is being prepared for TempleReady, and name the temple and any family file to which the GEDCOM is to be submitted.
* A caveat: As a result of adding this information to PAWriter data files, data files saved with ordinances in version 68 will not be readable in earlier versions of PAWriter. Of course, data files saved in earlier versions will be readable in version 68.
* If you don’t enter any ordinances in version 68, or you delete them all, the file structure will be the same as in previous versions and will be readable by earlier versions.
* The Reference folder has been updated to reflect these changes and a couple of errors corrected.
When updating, please replace the old Reference folder with the new Reference folder.