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Genealogy is enjoyed by millions of people,
and the home computer, World Wide Web, and many other modern technology
gadgets have revolutionized the hobby.
DACS May 3rd presenter, Jack Scully, started researching his family
history over thirty-five years ago, long before the availability of the
home personal computer. When he bought his first PC in 1982, he quickly
realized what an advantage it would be to use the organizational,
storage and printing capabilities of the PC to improve the recording and
documenting of his family history research. It was a vast improvement
over using a typewriter, pencil and ruler to make the reports and charts
commonly used to show family connections.
In the early 1980’s there were no commercially available computer
programs for genealogy. A lot of people were using generic database
software to record information about their families and writing their
own routines to print simple lists and pedigree charts. There was a lot
more enthusiasm than skill possessed by most of these family historians.
A few programs surfaced in the late 80’s, created by real computer
programmers who also happened to be family history buffs. They would
advertise in genealogy publications, work out of their homes and had
very sporadic support for their product. This all changed in the
mid-1990s when dozens of professionally written and commercially
produced software packages became available to the fast growing home PC
market. Most of these products produced high quality results and came
with a good support system. Many genealogy programs are available today
and continue to improve in function and quality.
With the growth of the Internet, a whole new research capability emerged
for these family history sleuths. Many old records that had been
difficult for genealogists to look at in the past became available on
the Internet. Several companies were digitizing public records, such as,
U.S. Census data, Immigration reports, Military records, Social Security
death records and Ship’s Passenger Lists and making them available on
CDs or on the Internet. Information that took months to locate, and
often required travel to some large research facility, was now available
on your home computer in minutes. One of the most popular program
packages, Family Tree Maker, offers an integrated Internet search engine
to automatically scan the Internet for information about people listed
in your family database. Broderbund, maker of Family Tree Maker,
advertises that over 4.5 million copies of this product have been sold.
They also offer hundreds of CDs containing historic information of
interest to family historians.
The DACS General Meeting is held at Danbury Hospital Auditorium, and is
open to the public. Events begin at 7 p.m. wih casual networking and
Random Access Q&A, followed by a business meeting at 7:30 and a short
break at 7:45. The Presentation starts at about 8:00.
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