Using Family Tree Maker 2008 - Post 26: Web Search V

I installed FamilyTreeMaker 2008 in early July and uploaded a large database to see how it worked. I also started a new database to test other program features. Please see the list at Using FamilyTreeMaker 2008 - Summary of Posts for all of the posts in this series.

For this part of the series, I'm using my great-great-grandfather, Isaac Seaver (1823-1901), in my database as a starting point for these posts about Web Search. In the last post, I demonstrated how FTM 2008 uses the Web Clipping feature to put information from web sites into FTM 2008 Notes.

In this post, I will show the results of searching http://www.genealogy.com/ and how to Web Clip a picture into FTM 2008.

In Web Search, I clicked on the Genealogy.com link in the left-hand panel. The Search form for Genealogy.com appeared with Isaac Seaver's name, birth and death years and locations input in the form (since I clicked on Web Search with Isaac Seaver as my selected person on the People page), as shown below:




I clicked on the Search button, and the search results from http://www.genealogy.com/ appeared, as shown below:

I could have clicked on one of the items, found information I wanted to include in my FTM 2008 database, Web clipped it (like in the last post), and moved on.

However, I'm going to use the image above to demonstrate how to capture a picture or image on a web page. Since the page above doesn't have an image I want to capture (of an ancestor or a scene), I will capture the Genealogy.com logo in the top left-hand corner of the screen. First, you have to click the Media tab in the lower panel. When you run your mouse over the image, a green boundary defining the image appears, as shown below:

Click the image you want to merge into your tree. The image appears in the Search result detail pane, as shown below (note the image in the lower right-hand corner):

When you click on Merge merge (highlighted in orange on the screen above), the image is merged into your tree, linked to the currently selected person, as shown below:

You also get a message that says "Media merged successfully."

This ability to capture an image from a web page (it could be any web page found using any of the search tools on the left-hand panel) is valuable - the user can easily put the image into the Media collection attached to a person. If the user wants to attach more persons to the image, then they can use the Media icon and procedures to do that.

I could demonstrate using http://www.google.com/, http://www.yahoo.com/ and http://www.live.com/ to capture more text or images, but that would be superflous, so I won't in order to save bandwidth.

I think I've covered most of the Family Tree Maker 2008 features in this series of posts, with the exception of Creating a Book using the Publish icon screen. Since FTM 2008 offers only creating books using AncestryPress, I didn't think that would be useful in this series, other than to point it out.

I will try to summarize the "what I like" and "what I don't like" about Family Tree Maker 2008 in the next series of posts (I can hear many readers saying "it's about time!").