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What's New at Wholly Genes? 
submitted by Pat Richley, Instructor DearMYRTLE@aol.com 

In deference to Jim Conoly, one of three members of our group remaining adamant about the benefits of using The Master Genealogist software, I visited www.whollygenes.com to see what's up. Please note that the following press release concerns a program that can be used by many others genealogy programs to create neat reports, look at data in multiple windows, etc.  The file I downloaded was saved as: "familytreessupertools.exe" and took about an hour and 25 minutes on my regular 56K modem. At our December meeting I will devote about half the session on the options available with this dynamic new genealogy software. (That's how fantastic I believe this "bridging" software is!) 

PRESS RELEASE
17 October 2001 from www.whollygenes.com 

Family Tree SuperTools has been released!
Essential add-ons for your family history software

Wholly Genes Software of Columbia, Maryland, is proud to announce the release of Family Tree SuperTools™, a suite of powerful utilities that work directly with a long list of family history programs.

Family Tree SuperTools brings advanced project management, the industry's most flexible charting tools, and many other exclusive features to users of Family Tree Maker™, Personal Ancestral File™, The Master Genealogist™, Family Origins™, Ultimate Family Tree™, Legacy™, and others. By reading data directly from these programs with its built-in GenBridge™ technology, this new companion product avoids the many problems normally associated with GEDCOM transfers. (GEDCOM imports are also supported, however, for users of other programs.)

With Family Tree SuperTools, you'll continue to do data entry in your current family tree program but you'll have the added benefit of these many new research and reporting features. Simply choose the "Refresh" feature in Family Tree SuperTools in order to update it with the most recent changes from your data-entry program.

The unique add-on utilities of Family Tree SuperTools include:

Advanced Project Management
View data from multiple research projects in one alphabetical list without being required to merge them together. Use the simple Import Wizard to access data from a variety of formats as received from other researchers or downloaded from the Internet. Then view it in relation to your own data without actually merging those data sets together. This innovative new strategy offers new insights into your research while maintaining an important "firewall" between your data and that of other researchers.

A "project" in Family Tree SuperTools may, therefore, contain multiple independent data sets. You can open and independently navigate multiple projects or multiple views of the same project. In a network environment, researchers can even share simultaneous access to the same projects.

Among its many display screens is the exclusive Project Explorer with its familiar Windows Explorer-like interface. Sort, filter, and "drill down" in order to navigate or compare entire lines of descent.

Heirloom-Quality Wall Charts
Family Tree SuperTools includes the exclusive charting features of Visual Chartform v2.0, the most flexible family tree charting program on the market. It supports a wide variety of formats for ancestor, descendant, hourglass, and fan charts. User-defined box contents may include photos, multiple lines of text, and even memos. Charts can be oriented in any direction (top-down, left-to-right, etc.), and they offer full control over box size, fonts, colors, shadows, a background image, and other characteristics. You can even color-code boxes based on flag conditions.

But that's just the beginning. Each box chart is not merely a graphic file but a "live" chart on which you can modify the properties of any object, drag-n-drop boxes individually or in groups, overlay objects, and cut and paste between charts. You can also add additional text, boxes, lines, images, and other graphic shapes with the built-in drawing tools. Professional editing tools include nudge, align, send to back, snap to grid, flip, rotate, etc. You can repaginate to skip page breaks or even rescale an entire chart to fit your specified dimensions.
A completed chart can be saved, printed, or exported to JPG, BMP, or Enhanced MetaFile (EMF).

Wall Chart Printing Service
Got charts? You can, of course, print a large wall chart to any Windows-compatible printer. Family Tree SuperTools will even print the cut marks to help you splice the pages together. But there is nothing quite so impressive at a family reunion as a full-color chart which covers a wall! With Family Tree SuperTools, you can point and click to submit your masterpiece securely over the web to Chartform Delivery, a chart printing service from Wholly Genes, Inc. Your chart will be printed on a single sheet of heavyweight paper using a professional large-format color printer and shipped to you in a mailing tube. Printing prices start at just $19.95.

Web Searching
Highlight one or more names in Family Tree SuperTools and then click to search for them on FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, Rootsweb.com, Gendex.com, and/or GenealogyPortal.com without any additional data entry. Search multiple sites at the same time for selected individuals or groups of names, including all spelling variations. Within Family Tree SuperTools, you may also specify keyword, proximity, fuzzy searches and other criteria as supported by those sites.

Multimedia Slideshows
Showcase your family research with educational and entertaining multimedia slideshows. Drag-n-drop pictures, video, sound, and text from the Windows Explorer or from the multimedia log of your project. Advanced production tools support frame transition effects, looping, video/audio segmenting, and spanning of audio clips across multiple frames. It also includes a viewer that you can freely distribute to relatives with your slideshow.

Historical Timelines
Display the events in your ancestors' lives in the context of historical timelines. Gain insight that will help your research by viewing their events in relation to politics, battles, county line changes, and general history. More than 40 timelines on a variety of topics are provided. You may also use other compatible timelines that are created outside the program or downloaded from the internet.

"Accent" Names
Color-code the names of people who match user-defined conditions. Any number of conditions may be specified, each with a designated color. Accent conditions may be based on flags (e.g, male=blue, female=pink) or on much more elaborate criteria (e.g., born in Virginia=red, died in Tennessee=blue, both=green). Save elaborate accent conditions to a file for later use.

Powerful search and filtering tools
The master alphabetic list of names optionally includes all name variations for each person (i.e., AKA, Alias, Nickname, etc.) so that a single search will find a person who has any matching name, regardless of type. Search or filter the alphabetical list or the Project Explorer using any number of powerful search conditions (Given name=John, Number of sons > 4, and Is a descendant of ID #7). Save elaborate filter conditions to a file for later use. These robust filtering tools and the "Accent" feature described above combine to make Family Tree SuperTools an especially powerful tool for analyzing your family history data.

Automatic relationship calculator
As you navigate to each person, Family Tree SuperTools will automatically display the blood relationship between that person and you (or another focus person that you specify) - a real eye-opener!

Other valuable utilities, including a date calculator, regnal date converter, and a relationship calculator that works between any two specified people.
 

Family Tree SuperTools offers all of these powerful tools for just :

$17.95 (for download) Order Here

$19.95 plus s/h (for download and CD)  Order here

Family Tree SuperTools is a true 32-bit application with support for right-click menus, long file names, user-defined screen configurations, and drag-n-drop of slideshow media and chart elements. It requires a Pentium 166 with 64 Megs of RAM running Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, ME, or XP. Web searching and chart uploading features require an Internet connection.

Company
Wholly Genes Software is a privately held corporation founded in 1993 with the goal of providing professional caliber software tools to family historians. Its flagship product, The Master Genealogist, is among the highest rated family history project managers and is in use in more than 30 countries around the world.

Press contact:
Tim Shaw (410)715-2260 x129
Wholly Genes Software

The Master Genealogist™, GenBridge™, Visual Chartform™, and Chartform Delivery™ are trademarks of Wholly Genes, Inc. All other trademarks belong to their respective holders.

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Three FTS Screen Shots
by Pat Richley, Instructor DearMYRTLE@aol.com 

OK, So I can't wait until December! Let me give you three screen shots of neat options I've found using Wholly Gene's new Family Tree SuperTools program! At first I just viewed the options with the sample database. However, one look at the "PERSON" view screen, and I was convinced to use this with my existing PAF Personal Ancestral File 5+ database.

The PERSON view does my favorite thing -- it shows the events in a person's life in chronological order, including birth of children, etc. This is something I have always admired about TMG The Master Genealogist. But according to the publisher, with Family Tree SuperTools I am not encumbered by GEDCOM incompatibilities. (Something we've noted between FTM and PAF with a few of our members in the past!)

One thing you'll especially like is the TREE (pedigree) view, with accompanying boxes showing children and siblings of the highlighted individual.

I've been concentrating on the RESEARCH LOG, where one can create a sortable running list of tasks to be done. As you type in the oblong rectangle in the right side of the screen, it activates the other portions of the screen, ie: Subject, designed, planned, begun, progress, completed.  

One can FOCUS on All tasks, general topics, a person, an event, a source or a repository. (This means that I can pull up everything I've documented from my trip to the Pennsylvania State Library. - Gotta enter the repository first, though!)

One may sort by principle person 1 or 2, by task name, by designed date, by completed date by type of task or without sort, meaning the order in which they were entered. Note there are also options for keyword filter and task name filter.  (This means I could filter to only view tasks containing the word CENSUS, so I could be sure to get all the census reports I want from my next trip to Orlando (microfilm) or online (at www.ancestry.com or www.heritagequestonline.com or www.usgenweb.com) 

Barb says there is an hourglass option for printing! I'll be experimenting with the program just to see what I can discover to report at the December meeting!

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Why I like to Use "Kids Sites" in My Family History  
by Pat Richley, Instructor DearMYRTLE@aol.com 

So you've heard a lot about putting your ancestors into historical "perspective."  Folks talk about generating ancestral timelines that overlap with historical and political events in the country of origin. I like to go to historical web sites geared to kids because they tend to be less wordy and more picturesque  in their approach to explaining an event in history. Maybe I am a "World Book" more than a "Britannica" type of gal?  Who knows!  

Just HOW DO you get a clear picture of life as it was for your ancestor? Since its November, let's take the example of the Pilgrims. Related topics would include:

• Mayflower
• Plymouth Rock
• the village of Plimouth

I visited and typed in the word "Mayflower" (without the quotes) and pressed enter to see what would come up on the "hit list."  After scrolling past the Mayflower moving and storage links, I found a great site for students and teachers at   There, I found the neat picture in the upper left corner of this page, as well as links to:

• Time Line (complete with pictures and descriptions of events in the one year period after the arrival of the Mayflower in the new world.
  
  
  
• Description of the voyage on the Mayflower. The diagram of the interior of the ship itself was something I've never seen before. It certainly explained the conditions during the voyage across the Atlantic.
• Plimoth: 1621 Depicting life as a pilgrim, life as an Indian, and the explanations about day-to-day chores, food, games, clothes and houses.
• Thanksgiving CyberChallenge (An interactive set of fun brain-teasers!)
• The Teacher's Guide gives you ideas for discussing the colonial lifestyle with your children and grandchildren.

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Another web site (one of my favorites from years past) is: http://www.plimoth.org/

Here you can take a virtual tour of the restored village in Massachusetts. You can also learn about upcoming activities including a hands-on "Learn to Talk, East & Play Like the Pilgrims" activity should you decide to visit this fall in person. The site also offers teacher's guidelines and special kids' activity pages.  Here I discovered the following colonial riddle, a real mind-stumper:

What is ten men's length and ten men's strength and yet ten men cannot make it stand on its end?

Give up?  Look at the bottom of the page for the answer! - From the same site "Both boys and girls in 1600s England and New England wore gowns (dresses) until they were about seven years old."

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From these 2 examples, we can see that kid-oriented web sites provide colorful, easy-to-read pages with succinct explanations of the principle players and related topics of the Plymouth Rock-Pilgrim time period. 

I don't know -- call my silly, but I tend to think that some web sites (as well as genealogy writers and lecturers) tend to get too serious in their approach, thereby spoiling the fun and intrigue of a more relaxed approach. While one cannot dispute the need for accuracy in research, who is to say that it must be done at the expense of enjoyment? 

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The ideas expressed in this publication are merely the opinions of the contributors. The writers, editors, publishers, and the Users Group are in no way responsible or liable for any damages resulting from articles, opinions, statements, advertising, representations or warranties expressed or implied in this publication nor do we endorse or recommend any products or services mentioned or illustrated herein.

The Manasota PAF Users Group is a non-profit educational organization in the State of Florida. Copyright 1999-2001. All Rights Reserved. dearmyrtle@aol.com 

Personal Ancestral File is the registered trademark of the Corporation of the President, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Master Genealogist is the registered trademark of Wholly Genes, Inc. Family Tree Maker is the registered trademark of Mattel.

The answer to the riddle is: A ROPE!