A few weeks ago I met Dennis Allsopp for lunch. Dennis lives in Australia, but visits South Africa occasionally on business, and one of his interests is developing the Genota family of genealogical note-taking software.
He had read my blog post on Keeping track of paper files | Hayes & Greene family history and decided to take up the challenge of developing a replacement for the Research Data Filer (RDF) program that used to be bundled with earlier versions of the Personal Ancestral File (PAF) lineage-linked program.
One of the problems with RDF is that it's a DOS program and it's a schlepp printing reports from DOS programs with Windows printers. But, as I noted in my earlier post, I've still found no better way of keeping track of paper files.
So if Dennis manages to develop a newer program that will do what RDF does, I'll be interested. I suppose the biggest challenge will be to get it to import the old RDF data.
Developing that might take quite a while, but in the mean time I played with Dennis's Genota Forms program and gave him a sample form template for entering information from South African deceased estate records. That could make it a hit with Southern African genealogists, as South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe use similar methods of handling deceased estates (called probate in other places).
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