I got into this hobby after my sister Tracey died in 1996. She was the family historian and was working on our family tree. In order to honor her memory I agreed to take over the task. After all, I was fairly good at library research and also had a knack for languages, which I knew I would need later.
Sometime after her funeral, her husband gave me all her notes and a copy of the software that she had been using along with her data. Tracey had been using an old DOS-based program called EZ-TREE to organize the information that she had collected. Being a programmer myself I wasn't too impressed with the program, so I desided to go with an more robust Windows-based program. After purchasing the new program I learned about GEDCOM files. Unfortunately, EZ-TREE had no way of exporting its data into GEDCOM format. Now I'm a computer programmer and getting the data into GEDCOM format would be no problem for me, and even though her database contained only 179 individuals, I wrote a small program to convert the EZ-TREE data into GEDCOM format.
Download the EZ-TREE to GEDCOM converter here.
After getting Tracey's data into the new program I reviewed the family tree and found that while she had quite a bit of information about our mother's side of the family, there was scant information about our paternal side. I decided that that there was the place to start my own research.
To be continued...