‘3 short talks from Computer Branch members’

Gillian Stevens, Paul King and Mike Dabbs - 16 Jul 2008
speaking at the BerksFHS Computer Branch, Woodley

The July meeting was originally planned as 'How members are using technology', and to be a nursery for new speakers, allowing them to do short 15 or 20 minute presentations on any 'mildly techy' subject relating to family history of which they had knowledge. On that score the meeting failed to meet its original aim, but instead, an excellent evening was provided by 3 stalwarts.

Transcription Tool for 1851 census - Gillian Stevens

Gillian Stevens gave a fascinating talk on the transcription tool for the 1851 census, which also helped to show what goes on behind the scenes in the society. Gillian has already written this up for the Federation of Family History societies, and you can link to it from
www.familyhistoryonline.net/fmp/1851.html

Simple tips for using Excel - Paul King

This was followed by Paul King, who runs the Wokingham U3A Genealogy Group. Paul concentrated on simple tips for using Excel to store and manipulate lumps of family history data. This session hit the spot with many of the members and certainly had the questions flowing.

Gramps

Finally Mike Dabbs introduced us to ‘Gramps’, a very smart looking and free family history program primarily for members who run the Linux operating system, although it also runs on Windows. Mike’s enthusiasm for Linux and Gramps, combined with good screen shots, gave us an excellent finale to an eclectic evening.

A quote from Mike was "that family history programs are rather personal and what one person will like another will hate. The only solution is to try them for yourself and see how you get on, which is where the FREE bit becomes very useful."

You can obtain a copy by 'Googling' Gramps and following the links (select download). Alternatively, go direct to  http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=25770&package_id=109309

Click on the box next to 3.0.0 to open the sub-menu, and for the Windows
version click on gramps-3.0.0-2.exe and follow the on-screen instructions.

The very latest version (3.0.1) is only packaged to run under Linux.

 

updated 4 Sep 2008