Ancestry Magazine

When Sarah got home from work, she found in her mailbox a big fat envelope from a lawyer in Tulsa. After a moment of fright, she realized that it was not very likely that she was being sued by someone in Tulsa. She didn’t even know anyone who lived there. She took a deep breath. “Why are they bugging me?” she thought as she slid her longest nail under the flap and butchered the envelope. She shook out the contents: a letter on parchment letterhead, a couple of wax paper sleeves that drifted across the table like leaves in a breeze, and two flat black plastic squares. “What kind of lawyer is still using those old-fashioned floppy disks?” Sarah thought. “He must be the last one in the free world who does.”

She read the letter, which said her great-aunt Velma had passed away in Muskogee. The will provided that Sarah, an avid genealogist, receive the compiled family history that Velma had been keeping. The letter also explained that Velma had managed to find her immigrant ancestor, a find that took her back six generations in Germany. The attorney indicated that the note from Aunt Velma and the disks had been given to him four years before, in the fall of 2000.

Sarah had never been close to Velma, but she felt bad for the finality of the passing. She didn’t like thinking of things changing in ways that couldn’t be undone. She didn’t like always having to adapt because things weren’t the way they used to be. Change made things stop working.

Sarah quickly realized how hard it could be to find a 5-1/4 inch floppy drive that worked with her computer. Weren’t those things capable of holding only 360K or something? She asked her friend Joe Don to convert it. Joe Don had kept his high school letter jacket, his first computer, and his first wife. He was happy to read the disks for her and soon sent her an e-mail with MYFAMILY.UDS attached.

So close and yet so far away! Here was the link to one of her immigrant ancestors and maybe even a family in Germany, and it might as well have been gibberish. Sarah asked her mother if she knew anything about Velma’s computer, but she found that Velma hadn’t had a computer for several years. Her son had suffered a heart attack and died suddenly several years before, and Velma’s health had declined steadily since. The computer stopped working, and, without her son to help her, it was abandoned and later tossed out. Sarah felt a bit guilty for not having kept in touch with Velma more, but she hadn’t known anything about those struggles at the time. She felt like the best way to honor her great-aunt was to preserve her work, so she redoubled her efforts to read the computer file and to share it with the family.

A quick Internet search yielded a hint: UDS file format is a Sierra Generations Family File. The site that contained that information also stated that the program was no longer supported. That didn’t sound good. A bit more searching revealed that the last version of Generations was released sometime in 2001. In their previous conversation, Joe Don had told Sarah to be sure and get the latest version of the program. He said that if she got an old one, it might not be able to open the file—even though it was the right program. Neither of them had any idea what version they wanted, but the Internet search showed that version 8.6 was the last version made.

Sarah understood that she needed to buy Sierra Generations Family Tree version 8. She also knew that it wasn’t going to be on sale at Best Buy. She went to eBay and searched for it. There was a copy on sale for only $3.95, and in her excitement she didn’t notice that it was version 4.

She called Joe Don and crowed, “I got it for four dollars! It’s coming in the mail!” But when she told him what she had bought, he pointed out that it wasn’t the newest version and that it might not open her file. “Oh, yeah,” she remembered. “It’s version 4, I wanted version 8.6!” Try as she might, she couldn’t find anything like that online.

Meanwhile, Back on Earth
I can’t tell you what happened to Sarah. I don’t know. She isn’t a real person, anyway. But she had a real problem. It’s a special kind of future shock called “data format obsolescence.”

Obsolete. No longer useful. Is there a sadder heard word in this graying nation? Twenty-five years ago we didn’t have personal computers, and now we have files that we can’t use anymore. I have fillings in my teeth that are older than some of my obsolete computer filings.

Technology is a catchy phrase for things that are complicated, most of which require electricity too. Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock described a kind of displaced feeling we get from having the world change around us faster than we like, and he predicted that the pace would quicken before there even was a Quicken. It’s enough to make you wonder which will last longer, your computer or your children’s attention span. I’m currently incensed with obsolescence. In particular, the vagary of data formats.

Genealogists have more formats than any other people, any time and any where. Before you protest that graphics lovers have many image file formats, I want to stop you. I have already got the picture. We have picture formats AND genealogy formats. No matter what you’re storing: family trees, photos, word documents, or the family bills, you have data stored in files. The files are created and updated (and randomly deleted) by software programs. The software runs on some kind of electronic device. Imagine a machine with three interrelated parts that have to work together. Let one wear out, or replace an old one with a new one, and the system might not work any more. There are many more combinations that imitate an unforgettable stinking smoking brick than there are combinations that produce an exciting unforgettable family hi story experience.

In 1998, Gary Hoffman wrote an article for Genealogy.com (see <www.genealogy.com/41_gary.html>) about file formats. In it, he listed fourteen genealogy programs, and identified the file extensions that each one used. As near as I can tell, six of them are still “alive”—meaning that someone is writing updates for them and still supports the files. That would also mean that if you had a family history file from 1998, the odds that you would be able to buy a program that can read the file today are about 42.8571 percent. Worse, you can’t tell if the program is still alive just by looking at the file extension.

A 1998 family history file with a .DBF extension might be from The Master Genealogist, or from Roots 4, or from Ultimate Family Tree. A .DAT file might be from Ancestral Quest or from Cumberland Family Tree. At least, if you had one of those files, you could get the wrong program, try to open it, and get an error message. Fast forward to the year 2000. Sierra’s Generations Family Tree program created a file with a .UDS extension.

Why Isn’t There a Library?
There is no place on earth, to my knowledge, that contains a working version of every genealogy program that was ever created. Why not? While creating such a collection of genealogy software sounds like a daunting task, I’m more concerned that no one is even trying. Sure, some of those programs will require old computers that are hard to find and keep running anymore, but that’s not impossible.

In the longer term, there is a “virtual machine” effort that holds promise. It’s an effort to make a modern comput er look like an old one—to give you an “emulator” window that can work just like an old IBM PC.

The genealogy community has always been somewhat at risk—information could be lost when it passed from living memory. Paper records are a fine way to save information—group sheets, pedigree charts, and loose notes last a long time under the right conditions. Computer records present a different problem: the information can be read only if the hardware, software, and data are all available.

Genealogy programs, with very few exceptions, store information in file formats that are unique to that program. Items as common as names, dates, and places are hard to pin down when the time comes for defining data formats. There are more name parts, calendars, and place features than you can shake a stick at. The end result is that genealogy computer programs store data in forms that can be read only by the program that makes them.

One potential solution is to save a copy of your information in GEDCOM format. Good news: Every genealogy program can read those. Bad news: Some data can be lost converting to GEDCOM—it’s an old specification, and its limitations have been written about many times. Good news: Another potential solution is to use a translating protocol like the GenBridge product from Wholly Genes Software. Bad news: As inspired as this product is, there are data formats and programs that it doesn’t read and write.

There is no better time to undertake a genealogy software museum than the present. While many people think of computer genealogy as Personal Computer Genealogy, there are programs that run on Apple computers, Windows machines, and handheld computers. Imagine that Sarah’s file was on a Smart Media memory card and had been mad e with My Roots. If it were found after 2010, would anyone be able to read and convert it?

Genealogists, by and large, work hard on their family history research. Ask yourself if you would be able to pass on your work any better than Velma did. Then find every copy of every program you ever used for genealogy and get ready to donate it to the Genealogy Software Museum. Perhaps someday there’ll be one that is more real than a columnist’s imagination.

Beau Sharbrough is the product manager for Trees at MyFamily.com, Inc. He is a popular genealogy lecturer and writes the RootsWorks articles for the Ancestry Daily News.