| Introduction to Family History With Computers |
| Welcome to a short course on Family History With Computers. The course is web-based, meaning that, for the most part, the content can be studied on the world-wide-web via the Internet. |
| The aim of the course is to encourage you to use computers to start or extend the recording of your own family history. You can study the web pages at your own pace, perhaps a few pages each week or about two modules per month. In addition to the web-pages there will be a monthly meeting for registered participants, during which time we will examine a portion of the course and any related topic that cannot be adequately covered with an on-line course. |
| Navigation through the course: The course is best navigated in a series, that is, one page after another, it will make more sense to proceed this way as the content of a page may be dependent on an understanding of a previous page. Each page has navigation hyperlinks forward to the next page, back to the previous page and a jump to the contents page. However, by using the Contents page it is possible to jump to a particular page, which will be essential for continuing the course from the last visit. You will be able to jump to the page that you wish to study by simply going to the contents page (index.htm) and clicking on a hyperlink to a particular page. |
| There are approximately 90 pages in this course and most pages contain illustrations. A design problem common to all illustrations is the attempt keep the byte size small so that the down-load time is reasonable. All pages in this course should download over a 56K modem in less than 30 seconds. If you have a slower modem then this down-load time will be somewhat longer but not excessive. |
| How do we store information? If we are serious about our
genealogy then we must look at a way of storing the results from research:
a word-processor or a spreadsheet is not good enough.
To amplify this storage problem I will illustrate a genealogical database known as
Family Tree Maker — in this course it will be often referred to as
FTM. There are other genealogical databases that will
store information in a similar way and course members are encouraged to
compare specifications and ease of use. What is a database? A database is a structured file, or a series of files, that make it easy to store, edit and retrieve data. Family Tree Maker is a purpose built database designed to work
with the storage and presentation of genealogical data. The FTM database
that will be illustrated in many parts of this course, is a real database that has been constructed over many
years. It has an extensive amount of text and non-text data —
non-text data includes photographs, drawings, videos, audios and
handwriting. A photographic album is a good example of
non-text data. FTM has a good capacity to store and display non-text
data, which we will be looking at as part of the course. We will begin the course by looking at a Family Page from Family Tree Maker. |
| [Click here to continue] |