Blogs - Page 5 of 6 - Progeny Genealogy Inc.

Charting Companion tells the story of your family

CHARTING COMPANION TELLS THE STORY OF YOUR FAMILY If you use a genealogy program such as Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic, Legacy, PAF, Family Historian or other, you need Charting Companion to display your family tree in charts. Charting Companion tells the story of your family in glorious color, with beautiful and unique charts. Charting Companion…

Tiling huge Fan charts

PRINT HUGE FAN CHARTS Did you know that you can print large Fan charts by tiling the chart over multiple pages? Charting Companion enables you to create Ancestor and Descendant Fan charts of any size by specifying the radius. If the size of the chart is greater than the paper in your printer, Charting Companion…

Charts in Rich Text Format (RTF) for direct word processor compatibility

CHARTING COMPANION NOW CREATES CHARTS IN RICH TEXT FORMAT FOR DIRECT WORD PROCESSOR COMPATIBILITY “You’re not sophisticated,” I teased my sweet, gentle wife. “That’s why I married you,” she promptly replied. I tried to regain my aplomb: “Well, I’m sophisticated”. “That’s why you married me,” she zinged. Do you ever imagine what life was like…

Charting Companion gets new tabbed dialogs (“Property Sheets”)

Software developers often use third-party software “packages” or libraries, to perform common tasks and avoid the time and expense of re-inventing the wheel. For example, reading and displaying images (JPG, PNG), or creating a PDF file, etc. are complex tasks that require much time to implement. Much better to call upon a firm whose specialty…

The genealogy of “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”

The best-seller “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” features the Vanger family, eccentric scions of a Swedish industrial dynasty. I thought it would be interesting to publish a Descendant chart of the characters in the novel, using photos of the actors in the Oscar-winning 2011 movie. Click to see the Descendant charts produced by our Charting…

Adobe Reader, you’ve crossed the line!

Ever wonder why Adobe’s PDF Reader is free? Offering a free PDF reader is a great way to make the PDF format ubiquitous and universal. Adobe makes & sells high-end PDF document creation & editing software to businesses and enterprises. A commercial license can easily rack up five-figure annual subscription fees. A powerful inducement to…

The perils of cycling your backups

The perils of cycling your backups We had a disturbing incident recently with a customer whose genealogy database was found to be corrupted. When the customer attempted to view a particular person in the database, the program crashed. Of course our software did not corrupt his database (it is read-only), we simply discovered the fact….

Effective backups

We all know that backups are important, right? It’s not if your hard drive will fail, it’s when. Yet we don’t all do them regularly because it’s a pain in the butt, right? Well here’s a practical solution, which I use daily. You will need a copy of Nero disk burning software, and MD5 checksum…

Pedigree + Family Group Record + Index: a dynamite combination

The nitty-gritty of genealogy is gathering information. Charting Companion offers great tools to get the job done: The classic Pedigree chart Matching Family Group Record A comprehensive Index The Pedigree is a rigid, fixed-format chart that differs from the Ancestor in that blank spaces are reserved for missing ancestors, instead of compacting the chart. …

Charts for Genetics

The Charting Companion Descendant and Outline Descendant charts provide some interesting genetic options: Y-chromosome and Mitochondrial. Both are useful for tracking the inheritance of genetic traits, passed on from ancestor to descendant. Here is a chart of all the members of a family. The males are colored blue, and the females pink: All the descendants…

The “Outline Descendant”: compact and complete

The Outline Descendant is a unique report that lists a person’s descendants, indenting for each generation. Charting Companion‘s Outline Descendant has a special feature: an optional recap header. Outline Descendant with handy “recap” feature How often have you waded through page after page of a Descendant report, only to lose track of where you are…

Telling the story of your family in a Book

Charting Companion is the only program[1] that can create a book from your genealogy data, and output it in a format that is truly compatible with your word processor: MS Word, WordPerfect, Open Office, etc. There are several benefits to this approach. First page of a Descendant Book (aka “Register”) You can fine-tune the font…