By Richard Rands

I tried Palm Pilots and Handsprings (with the Palm operating system) but didn’t like squinting at the tiny screens and writing in Graffiti. So I settled on an NEC MobilePro with Windows CE. That means I had to find a genealogy program that would run well on a CE device with a rectangular screen 7 1/2 inches long by 3 inches high.

I settled on Pocket Genealogist by Northern Hills Software, which is available for a 30 day free trial and, when purchased, comes in two flavors: the basic version for $20 and the deluxe version for $35. The Web site boasts about 75 different models of CE and Pocket PC devices on which Pocket Genealogist will run. The program does not run on Palm OS devices. This review covers the deluxe version.

As with most handheld genealogy programs, the format of the display is radically different from the familiar family or pedigree screens of PAF. In my opinion, PG comes the closest to a pedigree diagram turned up vertically like a tree, as opposed to the horizontal pedigree of PAF.

I usually want to check out three primary questions when evaluating a handheld program:

• How quickly and easily can I navigate around the database to find the information I need?

• How many of my 40,000+ names and thousands of notes and sources can I load onto the device?

• How versatile is the program?

Ease of navigation refers to how intuitive it is to move from child to parent, from the individual screen to the details screen, or from marriage to marriage. PG excels in this area by making the primary screen a combination of a three generation pedigree chart plus a family group chart. The couple in the middle generation are in the principal position, so that if you select either the husband or the wife, the details screen pops up, giving you eight tabs of details that can be stored for the individual. Close the detail screen and you are immediately back to the family/pedigree view. If you select any of the couple’s children, or any of the couple’s four parents, they are moved into the principal position, along with the spouse. If you have a color device, you can set the colors for the various relationships, making the screen more readable.

The volume of data that can be loaded into a palmtop or handheld device depends mostly on the memory capacity. The efficiency of the internal storage format becomes the limiting factor for squeezing in as much as possible. My MobilePro has 16Mb of memory, which must be shared by the Windows CE operating system and all the software and data that I need at my fingertips. Since I almost always have my laptop (with the full PAF database) with me when doing research, I use the handheld for quick name-and-date lookups. Therefore, I find it more useful to include the most possible names and marriages in my handheld database, rather than a mixture of names, sources, and notes. Using this approach, I was able to load more than 9,700 individuals and nearly 4,200 marriages into a single file on my handheld. This is far more than I ever achieved on a Palm or Handspring device with similar memory. Of course, you also can separate your main database into smaller GEDCOM files, load multiple files onto your device, and switch between them.

To load a database onto the handheld, you must follow the same procedure needed for most other handheld genealogy software except PAF for Palm: First you create a GEDCOM, then you open the GEDCOM in a translation utility program that saves the file so that the next time you synchronize your handheld with your desktop computer, a version of the GEDCOM will be loaded onto your handheld.

Besides setting colors for names and data, PG allows you to configure names to be displayed either surname first or given names first. You can set the home individual, and you can reorder the tabs in the detail screen. If you navigate around your file looking for someone, PG builds a readily available history list that allows you to go back immediately to any individual that you looked at along the way, making it very easy to switch to a different branch of your pedigree.

The search feature is probably the weakest function, but not any more so than most other such software. When you search on the first letter of a surname, the resulting list displays a count of the number of individuals for each of the surnames in the list. For locations, the resulting list displays a count of the events that took place for each of the locations on the list. If you select one of the entries, it lists each of the given names with that surname, or the details of each event at that location.

One significant weakness appears in the surname search. If the number of individuals with surnames beginning with the search letter exceeds the space for one page, the names are spread across multiple pages, but each page is sorted independent of the others, so that a specific name can appear on any of the pages. The page size can be set by the user. There doesn’t seem to be any sort sequence for events in the location list.

The program would benefit from indexed, current documentation. The downloadable documentation apparently does not include all features of the most recent version of the software, which may result in some users not taking full advantage of the features. Making the software current would result in Northern Hills needing to maintain multiple versions of the users guide – but for $35 software, that’s not unreasonable. Also, documentation, which is well written, needs a thorough index.

It is unclear from the Northern Hills Web site just which features are now available and which are on the wish list for future releases. The company invites communication and feedback with users and maintains compatible versions of the software for an extensive list of devices, including many that the PDA hardware industry long ago abandoned. Fewer users would need to buy new PDAs frequently if more software companies were this responsive to consumer need.

Overall, PG is a good program for a CE handheld device. It uses Windows effectively to make the program fast and versatile. It has an intuitive look and feel, and it is inexpensive.

* = inadequate ** = adequate; *** = good; **** = great; ***** = excellent

Websites

PAF for Palm

GedStar

My Roots

Pocket Genealogist

(See more of the Best of The PAFinder.)