http://www.genbox.com/
So lately I've been focusing on Software over research. There are a bunch of free trials or limited software versions out there. I've worked with Genbox for the past thirty days (they have a free thirty day trial) and really like it so far. Everything is pretty concise and well organized. I've had a few issues with it that just bug me though. I will go over those in a few minutes.
First an explanation of the individual tabs:
SUMMARY TAB:
The summary tab has three primary sections. The FIRST section has the individuals name and gender, their parent's names, and their spouse's name. If their are multiple spouse's they have a drop down so you can easily switch between them. The SECOND section has all of their children's names, their individual gender, and the child's birth date, all of which can easily be entered in. The THIRD section has all the events you have entered for the individual. By default, Birth, Marriage, Death, and Burial are already there waiting to have data entered in. All you have to do is put in the date and location.
PEDIGREE TAB:
This tab is just as it states. There are three main sections to this tab, sibling, children, and a three generational chart. All this data pulls well from the summary tab so I won't go into great detail. It is a nice feature.
IDENTIFIERS TAB:
This section has a place for SSN or nicknames, or other alias' that might have been used by the person. I have not used this tab much.
FAMILY TAB:
I did not try using this tab when I still had the 30 day license. I wish I had tried it out. It looks like a census could have been put in as a family event and it would show for all users. Currently I used the event tab which I will explain next.
EVENT TAB:
The event tab shows all the events listed with a little extra detail. It shows the event, date, place, plus some extra detail. The best part is the witness section. When it came to the census, I would enter in the date for the head of the house, then list everyone else from the house as witnesses, and their role (wife, sister, brother, son, daughter, etc).
Now on to my first issue:
I, like I assume most people do, research current and work my way back. That being said, I usually find an individual, put together their information and then look for the parents. For my example I will use Simon P, son of James J and Catherine. When I enter in Simon's birth date in the third section, his events section which already contains a space holder because, lets be honest, everyone has a birth date, it holds it quite nicely. However, when I go to James' Individual page Simon's name shows up under the second section because the software is smart enough to know that if Jame's is his father on Simon's page, then Simon must be James' son on his page. However the software is not smart enough to know that Simon's birth date is the same for both as well. No problem, let's just enter Simon's birth date on James' page. After doing so, Simon's page now has two birth dates. So in short, the software passes the child's birth date information on from the parent's page, but does not pass it to the parent's page. I know it's picky, but when you work backwards, the data should be able to pass from child to parent as well.
The second issue I have with the software is that when I try to open the GEDCOM file with another piece of software, the witnesses show as errors. Because of that the Census don't show up for anyone other than the head which is where the census was saved originally.
I may go back and look at this software again later. With the realization about the family tab, I would like to check it out again. What I may do is download the software on another computer, check out the tab and see how it goes. First I am going to check out other software and see how it goes. If I cannot find anything I like we'll see. My final issue is the $40 cost. Some others are a bit cheaper. But if they can't stack up, this may be the rout I go.
