Why and How Do You Use Other Software?

[gathompson56]

Why spend lots of time naming and moving files around when one has a tool to do it for them? Maintaining one's own filing system is much work for storage of documents that one wants handy but rarely looks at. By using FTM as my files, if I need to see a particular document for a person, I just fire up FTM, locate the person, click the media icon and there is all of that person's documents. If Reunion was synch-able with Ancestry, I would not have FTM.

hmmmm...
Interesting approach. I have both software. I will have to look into this a little further.

[Bob White]

Bob: Why did you give up on your "sensible filing system"?........ grant

Why spend lots of time naming and moving files around when one has a tool to do it for them? Maintaining one's own filing system is much work for storage of documents that one wants handy but rarely looks at. By using FTM as my files, if I need to see a particular document for a person, I just fire up FTM, locate the person, click the media icon and there is all of that person's documents. If Reunion was synch-able with Ancestry, I would not have FTM.

[gathompson56]

Reunion is my main guy. However, I always keep the current version of FTM installed. The reason is twofold.

Everything else is easily found in my copy of FTM without my having to maintain a sensible filing system as I used to do for many years.

(Note: I do almost zero work in FTM as, while it has improved over time, it is still pretty clunky when compared to the elegance of Reunion.)

Bob: Why did you give up on your "sensible filing system"?

grant

[Bob White]

Reunion is my main guy. However, I always keep the current version of FTM installed. The reason is twofold.

First, the majority of my research either is on Ancestry or I end up uploading items from all kinds of places to my tree on Ancestry.

This leads to my second reason ---- which is the synching of media between Ancestry and FTM. Do a synch and, voila, I have copies of all the media on my Mac. The only media that I include in Reunion's multimedia is photos of people. Everything else is easily found in my copy of FTM without my having to maintain a sensible filing system as I used to do for many years.

Those things are a very substantial "pro" but there is a "con" and that is, when adding new persons to my trees, I do double entry. (e.g., Add the person on both Reunion and Ancestry) I find this to be a small "con" which is far outweighed by the convenience of storing media in FTM. (Note: I do almost zero work in FTM as, while it has improved over time, it is still pretty clunky when compared to the elegance of Reunion.)

[B Jansen]

To make sure that the GEDCOM generated by one is suitable for other the other, or for other purposes, I have written several AppleScripts to help 'translate' one type of GEDCOM output to another, so that nothing gets 'lost in translation', eg. cleaning up tags and what have you.

I too am interested in what you have here!

I bought GenSmarts and Evidentia but haven't started using them yet for other reasons, but a smarter GEDCOM export from Reunion would help. I have been playing with RootsMagic for different reasons (better sourcing, ability to sync with FamilySearch, etc.), but their Lucy with the football routine for a native Mac version has gotten old.

[fjvanbodegom]

Hello Eric,
Might be you are willing to share those AppleScript files for adapting gedcom.
Perhaps I can use them in adapted form for helping Dutch people who switch (most often from a Windows genealogy program) to an Apple-Mac to optimize the gedcom import for Reunion.

Frans van Bodegom
Dutch Reunion User Group

[eric.vanbeest]

I use Reunion most because it is more flexible than any other genealogy program I have used and, even if some things can perhaps be improved, it helps me a lot in getting people and data into a tree instead of fighting your way via several dialog boxes or scroll scroll scrolling your way down for field entries. Ease of data entry is probably my biggest bug-bear: it has caused me to try and ditch every other genealogy program... (I started with Gene...)

Reunion's graphics have improved tremendously over the years, but I still find myself doing a lot of this in MacFamilyTree. MFT is also great for working with the LDS databases, as it makes it easy to download large selections of people quickly to build a tree. (Although, considering the amount of garbage data in there, you still have to verify each and every person and the corresponding sources)

To make sure that the GEDCOM generated by one is suitable for other the other, or for other purposes, I have written several AppleScripts to help 'translate' one type of GEDCOM output to another, so that nothing gets 'lost in translation', eg. cleaning up tags and what have you.

DEVONthink is my go-to storage for complete source material. I do not as a rule keep scanned source documents in Reunion databases or folders if they are available from online sources, as long as I can (hard/deep) link into them. Source html to the links is kept in DEVONthink so I save only the 15k HTML file and not then 1 MB web archive. Web archives in DEVONthink is manageable with up to hundreds of documents... but even my main family tree has tens of thousands of source documents to I need to manage storage. (I use the aliases information in DEVONthink documents to tie this to the source number in Reunion)
Because of lot of this in online, and in HTML, I also use AppleScript to read the documents and Keyboard Maestro to help automate getting data typed in into Reunion. This helps me save TONS of manual labour.

[gathompson56]

While Reunion is my primary data base I have been using FTM 2017 as my link to Ancestry. I find the syncing function very helpful.
I also have a copy of DevonThink which I intend to use to help track and manage my files, but I really have not fully utilized it.

What software do you use to compliment Reunion?