The Chula Vista Genealogical Society Computer Group meeting was held in the Library Conference Room on Wednesday, 21 January, because of a schedule conflict with another party that signed up for the computer lab. They didn't show up...but we stayed in our assined place. There were eight of us in the meeting.
Randy, Gary and Shirley had their laptops running, but no one could get a signal for the wireless Internet in the room. This is a constant frustration for us - we are so close... Randy started out hooked up to the projector.
Shirley opened the meeting asking if people had any computer-related problems that the group might be able to address.
A question was asked about Automatic Updates - how do you control when they are performed? We recommended going to Start>Control Panel>Automatic Updates and clicking the bullet for Automatic Updates and pick the day and time for them - pick the middle of the night if you leave your computer on all night. If you don't want to do that, then pick one of the other buttons to suit your pleasure.
A question was asked about accessing and using the Queries board on the Ohio USGenWeb web site. There is a Queries link in the top menu, and clicking that takes you to a query board. The user has to log in (if already registered) or register (fill out a form, wait for email confirmation and acceptance) and then will be allowed to use the Query Board.
Randy had Family Tree Maker 2008 on the screen, and since almost everyone in the group used some version of FTM, he showed some of the features of FTM 2008. Unfortunately, the Places screen couldn't show the Microsoft Earth maps since the Internet wasn't available in the conference room. Likewise for the Web Search screen. He showed the People screen, the Publish screen, and the Media screen. He showed several different charts and reports from the Publish screen, including an ahnentafel report and a descendants report. On the Media screen, he brought a photograph of his father into FTM 2008 (from his My Pictures file) and made it the thumbnail photo for his father.
Gary then connected his laptop to the projector, and demonstrated the Family Tree Builder 3.0 program. He used this program to create large genealogy reports for his ancestry, and he scrolled through the created report.
We hope to be back in the Computer Lab next month for the Computer Group meeting. Unfortunately, the Lab computers are not equipped to access web pages using Flash technology in Internet Explorer, so that limits the use of some genealogy web sites like the Record Search on www.FamilySearch.org and www.Footnote.com.
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