Recording and writing

It is amazing the amount of data you can accumulate in such a short space of time, particularly now so many records are available via the Internet (even if they're not all reliable and should be checked against originals where possible).

I'm a Mac user (predominantly) and, after trialling a few packages, decided to buy Heredis, a French family history package which, at that time, was only available in French. I still use the French version on my Mac (v10.2), and have the standard (free) version on PC, mainly so that I can share reports and charts with family in English without having to translate. Heredis provides the usual recording, charting, reporting and import/export (Gedcom) features found in many family history packages.

After exporting data to a narrative, book-like report (in English) some months ago, I've continued to maintain a 'chapter' (MS-Word document) for each generation, with family details and photos, maps, etc., where I have them.

There are many little vignettes (and lots more question-marks) that fill in the gaps between bare facts from BMD indexes and census data. With so much data, though, the thought of ever writing it up in an entertaining and interesting way for publication is daunting ... so not thinking about that at the moment!