Why I Love My Genealogy Software

Randy has posted about his desire to have the ability to generate date-specific lists in genealogy software. So far, he’d been unsuccessful in locating a software program that gave him the ability to generate a list of people who had events on a certain day. For example, generate a list of people in his database that all had birthdays on July 10th. After writing the post, he received a number of replies and learned of a few applications that can do what he desired.
But, then it occurred to me that the program I use seems to be an “underdog” among genealogists. I however, LOVE it and it is my preferred choice so far – I use a program called The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding that is developed by Darrin Lythgoe. My own family tree site using TNG is at http://www.taneya-kalonji.com/family/.
It was this program that got me really started in working on my genealogy as I was on a mission – I wanted to use a genealogy program that I could administrate SOLELY over the internet. TNG allows me to use the internet to manage my genealogy data. I do not need nor do I use a desktop application as my software, instead, I rely solely on TNG. This was important to me two years ago when I started and it remains important to me today. I do not like to be desktop dependent when I can help it. Believe me, I’m still looking for the perfect online hard-drive application so I no longer have to save all my files to my computer. One day… but, I digress.
So, being a database driven site, I can do just about anything. Fortunately, many things are built-in to the interface. When they are not enough however, I can create a custom report or even a custom database SQL query to get the info I need.
Need a list of people all born on July 9th (my birthday :-0) – I simply click on my “Dates & Anniversaries” tab, select the date I want, the tree I want to search, and hit “Enter”. Up comes not only those who were born on my birthday, but also who married, died and was buried on my birthday. That’s cool. I do wish though there was a way to sync this with Google Calendar. I’ve seen some solutions for that, but I’m not a programmer – need someone to make that process easier!
Here is my July 9th list.
TNG has so many other neat features and perhaps I’ll start a little blog series about it – help raise awareness! I think the largest barrier to using it is that it does have to be hosted online, but TNG makes recommendations on who to use if you don’t have your own domain as I already did. And, once it’s online, you really don’t need to know much more because the administration side is a set of well-done form-based web pages for entering data.
The TNG website has a lot of detail about the features that it offers at http://www.lythgoes.net/genealogy/software.php and there is also a link of some of the sites that use the application at http://www.lythgoes.net/genealogy/usersites.php. There are so many things I still have left to learn about this program, but Darrin makes updates often, so I’m sure I don’t have long to wait before things on my wish list show up in the program!
Even with all the upcoming online family tree programs, I still have yet to see anything that matches the flexibility and power of TNG. Go check out some of those User Sites. Prepared to be blown away!