Katherine Poulsen's Family Tree

Computer Genealogy

Genealogy - the study of family history and lineages - used to be an arcane hobby, pursued by people with an accountant's craving for detail, and an affinity for dust. The personal computer has transformed this into an exciting reason to get together with your distant cousins. All the dirty, boring recordkeeping on little 3"x5" index cards that would always get mixed up, has given way to hyperlinked databases that show lineage relationships graphically and allow easy searching.

The Mormon Church (see below) has many great resources.

Family Tree for Lars Poulsen

This covers myself, my daughter and my wife's family, so I have picked a couple of different starting points, allowing you to quickly get to each major section.

Myself - Lars Poulsen
My late father-in-law - Bill Wren
John Alden of the Mayflower is a direct ancestor of my ex-wife (and thus also my daughter).
LPOULSEN.GED - our complete GEDCOM data set - is available upon request to people who are in it.
Blank Family Group Worksheet in PDF (and in Danish)
To contribute, print one of these, fill in the data, and mail it back to me (or scan and email after you add the data).

Tools for Family Trees

If you want to work on this, you will need some tools, living on either your computer or on the web. Probably both.

Tools to run on your computer

As with all other computer related questions, the best tools last year are probably not the best tools next year, as computers evolve, companies go out of business, and new tools become available. Here are some of the ones that I know of:

Legacy Family Tree - This is what I use. The somewhat restricted "standard edition" is free, but the "DeLuxe edition" is only 35 USD, if you are willing to take a PDF file for the 300+-page user manual (USD 80 if you want the manual on paper). Strengths:
- Import and export GEDCOM
- Print forms and reports in many languages (including Danish)
- Owned by MyHeritage.com (see below).
Issues:
- No MAC or Linux version
Family Tree Maker
Family Tree Maker has been around since around 1990, but is still actively maintained. Costs USD 80 to USD 100; this site is dedicated to users of that program but has many generally useful resources.
- Available in Mac and Windows versions
- Integration with Ancestry.com (one-click synchronization)

Websites

FamilySearch.org
The great Mormon genealogy resource.
Ancestry.Com
Large commercial genealogy publishing house.
MyHeritage.com
A European collection of personal family trees, augmented with links national archives and other public records.
Archives.com
A subscription-based collection of database resources.

What is this with Mormons and Genealogy ?

The Church of Latter-Day Saints of Jesus Christ (popularly called the Mormon Church) pursues family history research as a religious duty; Mormon doctrine states that families can be together in Eternity, but only of they are baptized into the Church. Mormon doctrine allows baptism by proxy of dead ancestors under certain conditions. It is thus incumbent on the faithful to identify ancestors who may qualify. To aid in this mission, a huge historical research effort is sponsored by the LDS Church, and the research libraries supporting this effort are available to other genealogists, who are encouraged to share their data. The entry to this fountain of information is the "International Genalogical Index" (IGI) published on a set of about a hundred CD-ROM discs, available for searching at each of several hundred Family History Centers worldwide and on-line at FamiliSearch.Org.

Revision history:

	$Log: index.htm,v $
	Revision 1.5  2001/01/20 21:10:40  lars
	*** empty log message ***
	
	Revision 1.4  2000/06/13 07:00:05  lars
	Link to FamilySearch.Org
	
	Revision 1.3  2000/06/13 06:36:41  lars
	Add GEDCOM based family tree in HTML to page.
	
	Revision 1.2  1999/06/26 22:45:43  lars
	CMC.COM Site Re-Org.