Personal Ancestral File (PAF)
Please note that the information is provided ‘as is’, without any representation or endorsement made and without warranty of any kind whether express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, compatibility, security and accuracy.
The opinions expressed here are those of the reviewer. We hope that you will add your views. Please see the note at the end of the review to find out how to.
| System requirements | Windows 95B, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000 or Windows 95A with Microsoft Internet Explorer; Pentium PC or iMac with a Windows emulator; 32 MB memory; 20 MB to 60 MB hard-disk space; 256-color display adapter supporting at least 800 x 600 screen resolution; Windows XP is now supported with PAF 5.2 | |
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| Website: | Family Search |
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| Publisher: | The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints | |
| Price: | Free - download from website. PAF Companion $13.50 | |
| Data Entry: |   |
Data entry into PAF
is simple and intuitive. New individuals can be added by double-clicking
on the boxes for parents and children or by using the Add menu
or shortcut keys. You can also attach a person already in the
database to another family by this means. The main screen is the Family View where you can see an individual with their parents, spouse and up to eight children. The primary photograph of the focus individual can also be seen on this page. Baptism and burial dates are used to indicate life-spans when birth and death data is not available. The Pedigree View (one click away from the Family View) shows an individual and four generations of their ancestors - hovering the cursor over a name brings up their birth, marriage and death details and a single click add the names of their spouse(s) and children to this information box. The Edit Individual box summarises all the events or attributes you can record about a person and you can also add your own event types to the list. It is here that you can edit the sentence structure for how events will be reported in printouts and web pages. Other features include the ability to add multiple parents and mark the relationship as biological, adopted, guardian, challenged or disproved. You can also identify notes as confidential by prefixing with a tilde (~) and leaving a blank line before and after. Indicators can be turned on to show the relationship of the highlighted person to a specified root person in the status bar. If you add a file to your database, you can also check for and merge duplicate individuals. You can move around the database using the name list or contextual descendancy lists. Alternatively you can search for individuals or groups of people using the sophisticated filter feature. You can also specify a "home" person and a single click of button returns you to their record. Detailed source entry screens are available to record where you found your information. These include the ability to rate the reliability of the source material and to indicate whether the source confirms either the date or place of an event or both. |
| Multimedia: | Photos, sound and video files can be attached to individuals or sources. A caption and description can be added to each file and scrapbooks can be printed. | |
| Charts: |  |
There are no dropline charts available as part of the program or the associated package, PAF Companion. However, basic pedigree and ancestry charts (left-to-right) are available within PAF and the Companion package adds hourglass (ancestors to the left and descendants to the right) and bow-tie charts (father’s family to left and mother’s to right) to this. |
| Reports: | Ahnentafel and modified register reports are easy to generate and there are some well laid-out family group sheets. You can also produce lists of problem areas or end-of-line individuals amongst others and produce your own customised lists of selected individuals and events. | |
| Web Pages: | It is very simple to produce ancestry or descendancy web pages for an individual or details of selected individuals, but that simplicity comes at the price of reduced options. However, you are able to modify the header and footer for every page to meet your own requirements. The web pages are smart and straightforward to navigate. Web pages are saved to your hard disk and can be uploaded to the web from there provided you have personal web space, perhaps allocated by your ISP. | |
| Help and support: | A brief Online Getting
Started Guide is incorporated with the program as is a 189 page
user’s guide in PDF format (viewable using the free Adobe Acrobat
Read plug-in). There are PAF tutorials on the Family Search website .A list of PAF user groups is also available on the website and there is a rootsweb email list which you can join by sending the message subscribe to the PAF users mailing list on Rootsweb.com. |
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| Conclusion: | Personal Ancestral File is surprisingly full of features given it is made available free. Its support by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints means that it is likely that the package will continue to be developed for the foreseeable future. The Family View and Pedigree View screens are clear and easy to navigate and the data entry screen, although a little overloaded with information, is simple to use. The lack of a wide variety of flexible charts is a drawback but can be overcome by using additional packages. | |
| Rating: | Ease of use Data entry Multimedia features Charts Reports Web pages Help and support | **** **** *** ** **** *** **** |
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© Ruth Selman 2002 |
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