Just the Push a Procrasinator Needs

Sometimes, it just takes time to get the ball rolling. Especially for procrastinators.

It took the effective date of a mid-December announcement to push me to take action: Ancestry.com was discontinuing support of its once-popular program, Family Tree Maker. The date—December 31, 2015—was the last day a new customer could buy the product. Despite the promise that Ancestry would provide support for the program for an additional year, that date somehow stuck in my mind.

Of course, being a procrastinator, I missed that deadline.

Not to worry, though. In thanks for participating in a focus group exercise at a conference a couple years ago, I had been gifted with a much more up-to-date version of Family Tree Maker than my old clunker at home.

You may not be surprised to learn that I never had uploaded the program to my computer.

Well, last night was the night. After all, we're already six days past the deadline. Even a procrastinator can feel the urgency of the moment. I downloaded Family Tree Maker 2014. And uploaded all my family trees from my Ancestry account.

And live to tell of it.

The virtue of that move—at least according to those who use the program on a regular basis—is that I can now capture all the graphics of the documents linked to each supported fact in my Ancestry trees, and keep them resident on my own computer, without having to oversee the process of retrieving each document, one by one, on my own.

I rather like that little convenience.

Perhaps there is something about the cleaning and organizing ambience brought on by a brisk new month in a brand new year. It's not quite the same thing as the spring cleaning urge—too cold for that—but the organizing urge seems to blend well with the post-holiday clean-up.

Of course, along with those new tools from GEDmatch downloaded the other day, the reconfigured genealogical database manager will come in handy as I head to the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy next week for more training about genetic genealogy. In addition to more snow and less degrees than I'm used to in "sunny" California, the Salt Lake City experience will provide ample opportunity to put some head knowledge to practical use, and I want to have all the tools at my disposal during next week's class to maximize that experience.

So yes, better late than never—at least as far as class time is concerned. There are just some things you don't want to show up to class without.