Category: Personal Historian

Personal Historian is our unique software that helps you write the story of your life and of other individuals. One of the most common questions we hear is, “Is there a printed book to go along with it?” We’re pleased to finally be able to say, “yes!” with the release of Personal Historian 2: The Companion Guide, now available in our store.

This 192-page book was written by me, the author of Personal Historian.

“User Manual” is such an unfriendly word. I’ve tried to make this book much more than a cold, technical description of just another computer application. Because a personal history should be much more than a lifeless description of events, I wanted this book to be a little more colorful and have a little more personality.

Yes, you will find the expected technical descriptions and walk-throughs. But, hopefully, you’ll also find practical tips, new ideas, and needed inspiration to finally bring life to your life stories.

Introductory Price

For a very limited-time, you can get your own copy of Personal Historian 2: The Companion Guide for only $7.95 (plus shipping). That’s nearly half-off its regular price of $14.95. Simply visit our website and add it to your cart to receive the discount.

Don’t wait, order your copy today!

Table of Contents

Curious about what is inside? Take a look at its Table of Contents:

•  Introduction
  • Why you need Personal Historian
  • What is Personal Historian?
  • Personal Historian’s History
  • About this Book
• Why you can’t write your personal history
  • Why are you doing this?
  • The obstacles
  • “I don’t know where to start”
  • “I don’t have the time”
  • “I can’t remember enough details”
  • “I’m not a good writer”
• Getting started
  • The Welcome Screen
  • Creating a new file
• Importing Data
  • Importing Genealogy
  • Importing LifeCapsules & Timelines
  • Importing Other Text Data
• The Main Screen
  • Main Menu Toolbar
  • Status Bar
  • Story Details
  • Time Slider
  • Story List
  • Search Box
  • Filtering Stories
• Working with Files
  • Open an Existing File
  • Searching for a File
  • Moving or Renaming a File
  • Deleting a File
  • Copying a File
  • Checking and Repairing a File
  • File Options
• Managing Your Stories
  • Story Status
  • Adding a New Story
  • Editing an Existing Story
  • Picking a Random Story
  • Adding a Journal Entry
  • Deleting a Story
• Using Categories
  • Adding a New Category
  • Editing a Category
  • Deleting a Category
  • Changing the Order of Categories
  • Changing a Story’s Category
• Recording People
  • Relationships
  • Dates of Involvement
  • Adding a New Person
  • Editing a Person
  • Deleting a Person
  • Adding a Person to a Story
• Tracking Places
  • Geocoding Your List of Places
  • Adding a New Place
  • Editing a Place
  • Deleting a Place
  • Changing a Story’s Place
• The Editor Screen
  • Editor Menu
  • Editor Toolbar
  • Editor Status Bar
  • Story Information
• The Organizer
  • Organizer Toolbar
  • Organizer Items
  • Moving Organizer Items
  • Selecting Multiple Items at Once
  • Copy Items to the Composer
• The Memory Solution
  • Brainstorming
  • Step 1: Visualize
  • Step 2: Summarize
  • Step 3: Organize
  • Step 4: Repeat
  • The “O” Word
• The Composer
  • Composer Toolbar
  • Applying Styles
  • Fonts & Formatting
  • Adding Pictures
  • Importing a Document
  • Spell Check & Thesaurus
  • Readability Check
  • Dictating and Reading Back Your Story
  • Fullscreen Editing
• How to Write Good
  • Let Your Voice Shine Through
  • Make it Readable
  • Write to Your Audience
  • Write with Strength
  • Finding the Right Word
  • Shaking Things Up
  • The Difference
• Do I Have Your Attention?
  • Show, Don’t Tell
  • Add Context
  • What’s a newspaper?
  • Let Your Characters Speak
• Putting It All Together
  • Creating a New Book
  • Managing Books
  • Using the Publisher
  • Printing and Exporting Your Work
  • Publishing a Single Story
• Protecting Your Work
  • Rule #1: Backup your data often
  • Rule #2: Keep past backups, not just the latest
  • Rule #3: Keep backups in multiple places
  • Restoring from a Backup
• Good Luck
• Reference Guides
  • Program Options
  • Dates and Ages
  • Menu Commands
  • Keyboard Shortcut Keys
• Index

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)