The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Modern conveniences valuable tools for genealogy
This column was published March 31, 1996
Convenience is king in the United States.
If you don't believe it, just reflect on your grocery purchases. We Americans love nothing quite so much as convenience.
We want someone else to squeeze our oranges. We happily pay food processors to mix our cake, pancake and waffle ingredients. We love to buy dinner in a box ready for the microwave.
I'm a little embarrassed to admit the Day family has discovered how nice it is to let someone else chop our lettuce. We now buy it chopped and bagged. Why risk our fingers and thumbs? And I struggle to remember when I last peeled a potato.
Convenience is the card Broderbund is playing in the genealogical software game. The company's latest version of Family Tree Maker will knock your socks off, if you have a computer with enough muscle to run it.
FTM Deluxe Edition II is a database program with many features for storing and printing family genealogy. But it's also much, much more. It's a research vehicle.
Promotional literature for FTM Deluxe II heavily emphasizes this research side of genealogy. The folks at Family Tree Maker think we'll pay for the convenience of doing more of our research in our homes, in our own computers, and make fewer trips to libraries and archives.
The company has published about 45 compact discs of genealogical records in its Family Archive series. FTM Deluxe comes with a package of five CDs. One contains the software program you will install on your computer's hard drive. The other four contain a variety of information that may be valuable in your research.
Two of the CDs contain U.S. Social Security Death Benefits Records for the entire United States, from 1937 to 1993. These CDs hold about 55 million names of deceased people who received Social Security benefits, their dates of birth and death, Social Security number and state where it was issued, state of residence at death, and postal zip codes for last known residence and for the address where the death benefit payment was sent.
This information, of course, is of great genealogical value.
The day I installed my copy of FTM Deluxe II, I popped the Social Security Death Benefits CDs into my CD drive. Within minutes, I had death dates I hadn't previously had for two of my stepfather's brothers, one of his aunts and one of his uncles.
This was information I had on my to-do list, but always forgot to take with me on my jaunts to the Mormon Church's Family History Center in Moscow, Idaho, 11 miles from my home in Pullman.
I also pulled up some information on the Richardsons in my Day genealogy. The other two CDs that come with the program contain FTM's World Family Tree genealogical collection and the Family Finder Index. The World Family Tree CDs contain genealogical data on 6 million individuals organized in about 12,000 family trees contributed by FTM customers. Family Finder Index includes 115 million names that appear on marriage, land, census and other records.
The deal is you find names on the indexes and buy the relevant CDs. And there's the catch. The CDs that contain the data you want cost $19.99 to $45 each -$1,469.55 for all of the CDs listed in a flier accompanying my software package.
Of course it's assumed no one but a library would want them all, but a genealogist could easily need half a dozen or probably even a dozen. This can get a bit pricey, but then, genealogy isn't an activity for the faint of pocket book.
Some genealogists have a problem with Broderbund's approach. They especially resent Broderbund asking customers to submit their family trees on diskette, then selling that information on their CDs.
I see nothing wrong with this. It's a service to genealogists. Broderbund has to meet expenses and is entitled to a reasonable profit.
Whether the service is worth the price is for you to decide.
If you're interested, be sure to check complete system requirements before laying cash on the line.
Copyright 1996 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.