Hello All, ..... I have been doing my family history and a one-name-study of the HANWELL surname since my Father died in 1966, when I took over his genealogy work which he had started in the 1930s. Needless to say, his and my early work pre-dated all family history computer programs. In the early days of personal computers, I acquired a Wang Classic computer, with a hard-drive which would not hold much more that a Wang Word Processing text program and a Lotus 123 (version one) spreadsheet program. I copied my family trees to Lotus 123 and had to keep all my own data on unreliable 5.1/4 inch floppy discs, because the computer's hard drive was too small for data storage. Some of my trees soon outgrew the 746 kb disc memory size and I installed a 3.1/2 inch floppy disc drive into the computer. 3.1/2" floppy discs had a whopping 1.44 mb capacity, allowing me to store larger family trees. When Lotus 123 version 3 arrived, I upgraded my Computer to a Wang 386, which allowed me to use a mouse - FABULOUS - no more need to have to press three keys together to use Lotus features! I was also able to install Windows 3.1 and get internet access via a modem WOW! Later still, I transferred my data to Microsoft Excel, to make it easy to share with friends and family across the world, as Microsoft Office was becoming very common. Even Microsoft Excel ran out of space for my larger trees with its 256 column width limit and I had to wait until 2007, when Microsoft increased the number of columns more than ten-fold. Even then I could not share it and therefore avoided using it, until more people updated their Microsoft Office and were able to read the 2007 version. ..... The point which I am making is that I still keep all of my family trees and genealogical records on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, which I can send around the world to Genealogists and non-genealogists alike. Recipients do not have to have special genealogical programs to read them. Excel is excellent, in that additional information (text, photographs, calculations etc) can be stored off the main spreadsheet and you only have to click on a square on the spreadsheet, to be able to view that information. The square can be made to look like a button adjacent to the name or event on the spreadsheet, or it can be the square on the spreadsheet on which the name or event is recorded. The user has the choice. ..... Excel is a great system and has the massive advantage over genealogy programs in that marriage details (date, place etc) can be shown on the actual tree. Genealogical programs force me to do what the programs want me to do, whereas a Microsoft Excel workbook and its spreadsheets are completely flexible. The only downside is that genealogy websites lack the ability to upload Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. It would be the icing on the cake if they would do so. I have so much data on the HANWELL family trees, that I cannot transcribe it all onto website records and I usually just transcribe my own simple HANWELL direct line ancestral chart and little more. It is a great shame that genealogical websites are not more flexible and do not cater for Excel. Regards, Adrian. ---------- ********** ---------- Adrian Hanwell. [email protected] ---------- ********** ---------- -----Original Message----- Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2016 10:48:47 +0100 From: Ron Lomax [[email protected]] Subject: FTM/Organisation Advice Needed Please To: Goons [[email protected]] Message-ID: <[email protected]> Hello All, I am relatively new to the concept of a one name study, but have been an amateur genealogist for many years. I would like to pick people's brains concerning how to organise and record the study. According to the WIKI, the most favoured family tree software is FTM, which I also use. I have upwards of forty sourced family trees. If I keep them in separate FTM files, then finding someone is a nightmare, as is checking for duplicates which may link two trees. If I merge all the trees into one FTM file, (some 7000 people), it is almost impossible to locate a particular person, even with birth and death years, due to the 19th century spawning hundreds of Williams, James', Johns and Charles'. I have to use trial and error, and if I do not have either a definite birth or death date, then I may go through each one and not know whether I have him recorded or not. FTM does not give me the option of showing places in the index. I thought of using the FTM Person ID with a prefix representing the tree the person comes from, but this is overwritten if you merge all the trees. There is no report within FTM which shows BMD dates AND place of birth/death, so I cannot export a list from each tree and combine them in an Excel table. I cannot help feeling that, if there are many people using FTM, I am either missing something or expecting too much. I have considered switching from FTM, but I like the interface better than either Legacy or RM, and would prefer to stick with it if I can find a way round my issues. Has anyone else found a solution to this problem, or have I to bite the bullet and use more appropriate software? Any advice would be much appreciated. Many thanks Ron Lomax