Jul 252010
Thanks to Thomas MacEntee at Geneabloggers for his meme on “What I Do”
The idea is to list what tools you use for your genealogy. Working as a professional genealogist, this is what I use on a daily basis:
* Hardware: Dell PC on XP and emachines Laptop on Vista
* External storage: several 1GB memory sticks, Maxtor 160GB hard drives, new Seagate 1 Terabyte hard drive (vast!)
* Online storage: N/A
* Backup: to external hard drives
* Printer: HP Officejet J4680 (mainly use the scanner) and use Canon Pixma iP6600D for printing
* Phone: Blackberry
* E-mail: Microsof Outlook 2007 with Gmail IMAP server
* Mobile device: Blackberry
* Mobile media: not yet but I need something to mask the “chat noise” in the search room which I find distracting – could perhaps use the Blackberry with additional memory? or earplugs 
* eBook Reader: sorry – still on the paper kind but liking Google’s “My Library”
* Browser: Google Chrome
* Calendar: hangs on the wall and I have a large white board for project-tracking
* RSS: Google reader, Feedburner
* FTP: SmartFTP
* Text editor: Notepad
* Graphics: Microsoft Photo Manager, Photoshop 6, Scansoft Paperport
* Screen capture: like Thomas – PrtScrn and paste into Microsoft Photo Editor
* Social media: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
* Social bookmarking: not got that far with technology yet
* Social profile: as above!
* URL shortener: bitly
* Office suite: Microsoft Office 2007 and sometimes Office 2000
* Accounting: Excel
* Web Conferencing: not yet but I use Powerpoint for presentations
* Firewall: Microsoft
* Virus protection: AVG
* Spyware: SpyBot and AdAware
* File cleaner: AML Free Registry Cleaner
* Genealogy database: Family Historian, occasionally RootsMagic
* Genealogy tools: currently playing with GenSmarts; and my better half wrote me a Birth Date Calculator program years ago which I use every day
* PDF generator: PDF995
* Music player: an antiquated Sony for CD’s and Radio 4
* Blog: WordPress
* Car audio: whatever came with the car. The car’s so noisy there’s no point trying to listen to the radio
* Other tech stuff: Nikon D40 camera and Flip camera (for cemeteries – weyhey, I love cemeteries!). Bespoke software specially written for me to produce my reports.
Can you believe, I am sitting here on our veranda at the lake, the temperature is still near 30 Celsius and I really read your post, all about this your catalogue
)
I like all kind of software and technique things even I am the grandmother of six
I have been studying my ancestors here in Finland. Our “Parish registers” are as digital on the Internet and I can learn plenty of things about my ancestors just sitting at home.
We can go only 1500th but it is something really.
I wish you beautiful summer days Jo !
Hi Leena – I hope you enjoy summer at the lake, it’s cold here! Usually I find that most Scottish families can be traced back to the 1780′s or 1790′s and then there are difficulties. Congratulations on your Finnish research, genealogy is very addictive