Shar­ing our Knowl­edge
Part 13: A Man­age­able Future Updates Program

Shar­ing our Knowl­edge is a series of arti­cles about the His­to­rian Archives Project and how you can become involved.

In past arti­cles, I described turn­ing our His­to­rian Archives into an online pres­ence, and into a use­ful resource avail­able to our mem­ber­ship. It’s a large multi-year project, but it’s man­age­able and rel­a­tively straight-forward. We can tackle one piece of the project at a time, as time per­mits, know­ing where that piece fits into the over­all plan. Each step pro­duces tan­gi­ble results – always a good feeling.

J.E. and Katie Gilbert at the Dixon His­tor­i­cal Society

We con­tinue with a sim­i­lar approach. Let’s take things in small man­age­able bite-sized pieces, and tackle what we can as time per­mits. As with the Pre­lim­i­nary Infor­ma­tion pro­gram, this is merely my own sug­ges­tion. Whether it has merit remains to be seen!

In the past (and present), Strong Updates have been in the form of book man­u­scripts. We have a num­ber of large Microsoft Word, Word Per­fect, and Pro­fes­sional Write doc­u­ments which are the man­u­scripts for past and future Strong Updates.

If we are pub­lish­ing on CD, we can include many other types of media – color charts, photo albums and slide shows, and so on. But our basic genealog­i­cal infor­ma­tion remains in book form.

In the world of geneal­ogy, there are two (or more) ways of cre­at­ing that book. The first is with a word proces­sor. That’s what we’ve been doing all along. The sec­ond way is to begin with a geneal­ogy pro­gram such as Fam­ily Tree Maker, The Mas­ter Geneal­o­gist, or Legacy Fam­ily Tree. Use the geneal­ogy pro­gram to gen­er­ate the book sec­tions, and use (for exam­ple) Microsoft Word to assem­ble those sec­tions into a book, add the front mat­ter, extra essays and pho­tos, and so on.

Please share your ideas!

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