Tom Wetmore wrote: > Note one very interesting thing about the five answers so far. No one > says they use their genealogical application to store their evidence. > Is this a failing of genelaogical software in general, or is handling the > evidence and handling the persons such two fundamentally different > things that we need two completely different programs for handling them? I won't speak for Steve or Ian, but in MY case I tried putting it all into the genealogical database. It worked fine for me while I was doing it EXCEPT for what I see as a personality failure. If I were looking for the /exact/ date of a death in the Mobil family, I'd invariably notice that Ol' Skylar was in there 12 times ... and I'd end up opening all 12 items to find the one with ancestors and descendants. I considered that a waste of my time and energy, so I went back to paper, which I handle only when I need to. > My answer is that genealogical programs should be able to handle evidence, > but no one has figured out how to do it yet. I don't think one ought to mix results with process. In fact, one ought to have two processes -- one double-checks the other for legitimacy; keeping research/evidence on paper and transferring it to the database provides both the separation of tasks AND the cross-check. Cheryl