Category: Products

Yeah, I know synopsis is a fancy word for this article, but we’ve been blogging all month about all the great new features coming in Personal Historian 2 and we didn’t want to make folks have to dig through all of those articles.  So here is a list of those articles that you can just click to get to.

• Personal Historian 2 Sneak Preview
• Getting Started with Personal Historian 2
• Writing Stories in Personal Historian 2
• Importing Genealogy Data into Personal Historian 2
• Using LifeCapsules in Personal Historian 2
• New Tools in Personal Historian 2
• Publishing Your Stories with Personal Historian 2
• Personal Historian Essentials

As I mentioned last time, I have one more new Personal Historian “feature” to share with you.  While not technically a feature, it is an exciting change.  With the release of version 2 we will be replacing the usual demo version of Personal Historian with a new free Essentials version.

Personal Historian Essentials will share many of the same features with the full Personal Historian software including clean and friendly screens, the ability to add an unlimited number of stories, categories, writing tools, LifeCapsules, and the ability to publish a complete personal history.  The full version of Personal Historian will be available for purchase and include features not available in Personal Historian Essentials.

So what comes next?

Later this week we will begin taking orders for Personal Historian 2 and release it as a download, followed a few weeks later by the CD version (it takes a few weeks to get CDs duplicated and packaged).  When we begin taking orders you will be able to pre-order the CD and get the download early if you want to do that as well.

And if you want to watch a live demo of the new Personal Historian 2, don’t forget to join us for our free webinar “What’s New in Personal Historian 2” this Wednesday (Sept 28th) at 6pm MDT.  To sign up for the free webinar, visit:

http://www.rootsmagic.com/webinars

One of the most powerful enhancements in version 2 is the Personal Historian Publisher.  The Publisher lets you create complete books, including cover and title pages, table of contents, copyright page, chapters with your stories, indexes and more.

Create Multiple Personal Histories

The Publisher lets you create multiple books from a single file.  When it comes time to print your book you may want to sometimes print every story, or you may want to only print certain stories.  Publisher lets you design custom books, each with their own cover and title pages, their own sets of chapters and selected stories, and their own index.  You can then quickly print different versions of the person’s history by selecting one of the books and generating it.  As an example, you might create one book that includes all of the person’s stories, another without “private” stories, and another with just the stories in the education category that occurred between the ages of 12 and 19.

Design Your Own Chapters

Personal Historian can organize your stories in several different ways.  It can group your stories based on their primary category, or group them by the person’s age, or not group them at all (by putting them in a single chapter).  You can customize the order the chapters are printed, including just rearranging them by dragging and dropping them.

Add Special Sections

Publisher doesn’t limit you to chapters with your stories.  You can also add special sections like a cover and title page, preface, dedication page, and more.  You can even have Personal Historian automatically create a Table of Contents for your book.

If you have tagged your stories with the people and places in those stories, Publisher can even create indexes for your personal history.

Preview Your Books

The Report Viewer shows you on screen what your book will look like on paper.

On the left is a list of thumbnails of each page in the report. You can use the arrow keys or the scroll bar to scroll through each page in the report, or you can use the mouse to scroll down (or up) and go to the desired page.  You can zoom in and out to see more or less detail.

Print or Save Your Books

The Report Viewer makes it easy to print or save your books.  Just click the Print button to send your book to the printer, or click the Save button to save your book as either a PDF (Acrobat) or RTF (Rich Text) file.

Email Your Books

If you want to send a book to friends or family, you can click the Email button on the Report Viewer, and Personal Historian will automatically save your book to file, open your email program, start a new email and attach the book to the email.  All you have to do is enter the email addresses and a short message.

So that’s an overview of Personal Historian 2.  In our next post I have one last new “feature” to mention, as well as details about the release, so keep watching.

Personal Historian has always had tools to help you write and organize: spell checker, thesaurus, readability check, outline creator, filters, and more.  Here are a few of the new or improved tools coming in version 2.

The first 3 tools I’m going to mention can be found on the screen where you write stories.  You can click the image to see it full size.

Multiple Categories

You can now assign a story to more than a single category.  Categories help you when you want to find or filter your stories.  You can create as many categories as you want, but in the past you could only assign a story to one of those categories.

Now it is possible to do things like assign a story to a “Private” category, a “Family” category, and an “Education” category all at once.  That story will then appear when you choose to view any of those categories.

People List

Personal Historian will now let you keep a list of all the people you mention in a personal history.  If you import from a genealogy file, those people will automatically be included in the People list, but you can also add additional people to the list as you see fit.  You can tag each story with people from the People list, and later filter the story list based on any group of people you choose.  For each person you can track their name, sex, relationship to the main person, and the range of dates they were involved in the main person’s life.

Place List

Many stories take place in more than one location.  You can now keep a list of all the places you mention in a personal history.  Like the People list, any places will automatically be added to the list when you import your genealogy file.  You can tag each story with places, and later filter the story list based on any group of places you choose.  Even cooler, you can filter the story list to only stories which occurred within a certain distance of any place.

Gazetteer

To assist with your places, Personal Historian also includes a Gazetteer of over 3.5 million place names.

Better Filtering

You’ve always been able to filter your stories in Personal Historian, but now it is even easier.  Status and category filtering can now be done instantly from the new filter panel on the left of the main Story List.

And don’t forget about the new filtering options mentioned above (people, places, and places within a certain distance).

More Story Tools

And here are a few of the handy tools available when you are editing a story:

• Full screen mode lets you expand the edit area to fill the entire screen
• The outline organizer now lets you copy your outline into the writing area
• The improved Readability Check screen makes it easier to see how to improve your writing
• You can now have Personal Historian read your story to you
• Personal Historian can now be set up to take dictation (you talk and it writes)

Our lives are shaped by more than just the things we do.  Historical events and cultural happenings (music, tv, movies, radio) all impact our lives and the things we do.  We’ve talked about adding stories to create a personal history, but Personal Historian allows you to add context to a person’s life with LifeCapsules.

A LifeCapsule lets you add topics to your story list about historical and religious events, epidemics, cultural happenings, and even “memory triggers”.  When you add a LifeCapsule to your file, Personal Historian will include topics in your main screen story list.  So, for example, if you add a U.S. history LifeCapsule, you will see historical events which occurred during the person’s life intermingled with your own stories.  In this sample screen you will see that several different LifeCapsules have been imported (click the image to see it in full resolution).

Now while you may want to write a story for certain LifeCapsule topics that get added, they are also useful for triggering other memories that you may want to write about instead.  For example, you might not want to write a story about the start of the Great Depression, but showing that it occurred during the teen years of a person might give you more insight into some of their behaviors later in life.

In addition to expanding the existing LifeCapsules, Personal Historian 2 adds a number of new LifeCapsules.  Included are (remember that features new in PH2 are bold):

• African American history
• Australian history
• British history
• Canadian history
• Catholic history
• Epidemics
• Foods
• Industrial Revolution
• Inventions
• Jewish history
• LDS history
• Memory triggers
• Movies
• Music
• Radio shows
• Television
• Toys and Games
• U.S. history
• U.S. holidays

Stories added by importing a LifeCapsule work just like your own stories… you can edit them, delete them, filter or search by them, and include or exclude them in your published personal histories.

In addition, we will be releasing a new LifeCapsule Editor about a month after PH2 is released, so you will be able to create your own LifeCapsules to use and share with others.

In our next sneak peek we’ll look at some of the new tools in Personal Historian 2, including the new Person and Place Lists which you can use for tagging stories.

So where do you start when trying to come up with stories for a personal history?  If you have been entering data into a genealogy program you can use that information to get you started.

Personal Historian will import the events from any group of people you select, including any pictures or sources (remember, bold items are new in version 2).  You can import from RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker (16 and earlier), PAF, Legacy, or GEDCOM.

You can choose who the personal history will be about, as well as any other family members you want to include.  You can even select which events you want Personal Historian to import.  So you could just choose basic events like birth, marriage and death, or you could choose to include all events like occupations, residences, and more.  Personal Historian will display the imported events on the main screen Story List (click the image to see it in full resolution).

If you have any notes, sources, or pictures attached to events, Personal Historian will import those as well.

You don’t have to write a story for every event that Personal Historian imports, but you can use them as placeholders to write about later, or to just use for context in the person’s life.  If you really don’t want the event just highlight and delete it from the main Story List.  You also don’t have to stick with the computer generated story titles.  You can easily change “Kathleen Peggy Hobbs (Wife) was born” to “Ronald’s Future Sweetheart Arrives”.

Finally, what happens if you add more information to your genealogy software?  Well, just re-import the file into Personal Historian.  In the past that would have been a very bad idea because you would have ended up with duplicate events / stories.  But in version 2, Personal Historian will check as it is importing to make sure it doesn’t import duplicate events.

So once you have imported your genealogy information into Personal Historian, its time to add some context.  Next time we’ll talk about LifeCapsules, an easy way to add historical timelines or memory joggers to your personal history.