This is the UVPAFUG Meeting You Have to Attend!

UTAH VALLEY PAF USERS GROUP

The next regular, second-Saturday-of-the-month meeting of the Utah Valley PAF (Personal Ancestral File) Users Group will be on Saturday, 10 May 2008, from 9 am until noon in the LDS "Red" Chapel at 4000 North Timpview Drive (650 East), in Provo. The main presentation this time will be NEW FAMILYSEARCH SYCHRONIZATION WITH ANCESTRAL QUEST (Gaylon Findlay), FAMILY INSIGHT (John Vilburn), AND ROOTSMAGIC (Bruce Buzbee) .

These presenters are the primary authors of these programs and as such will be able to give us a really good overview of how their programs will work with New FamilySearch (NFS) which the LDS Church is releasing a few LDS Temple Districts at a time. It is presently in operation in over 50 of the more than 125 Temple Districts of the Church and will be in more, if not all, by the end of 2008.

NFS is designed to fulfill President Gordon B. Hinckley's concern of how to make temple names submission simpler, while still avoiding duplication. It is a massive effort by the LDS Church and has been many years in the planning and programming. The LDS Church has encouraged private ventures to work on making their genealogy programs capable of synchronizing (communicating) with New FamilySearch.

In the case of Family Insight (new name for PAF Insight), the program allows PAF (Personal Ancestral File) databases to communicate with New FamilySearch. This synchronization allows editing of New FamilySearch data, e.g. searching and combining names in NFS, as well as downloading data from NFS databases to update the patrons' personal genealogy database.

These are programs that Gordon J. Clarke referred to in his presentation when he mentioned third-party products to work with New FamilySearch as he spoke to the Utah Valley PAF Users Group a few months ago. These presentations and questions and answers by the authors will take the entire time of this meeting, so there will be no classes this time. Other programs to synchronize with NFS besides these three will undoubtedly be announced later, but these are the first.

All meetings of the Users Group are open to the public whether members of the Group or not. The Users Group has the goal of helping individuals use technology to further their family history and there are usually 100-125 attending the monthly meetings on the second Saturdays. Several of the officers, including Gerhard Ruf, President; Brian Cooper, 2nd VP; Lynne Shumway, PAFology Editor; Kay Baker and Gerry Eliason working with finances and membership; and Bruce Merrill, Eileen Phelps, and Marie Andersen, working with the DVD & Video Library, will all be there. They will help with membership, questions, distribute the current issue of the monthly newsletter PAFology, and check out DVD's and videos of past presentations and classes to members of the group. Information about the Users Group, main presentations, classes, and class notes are available on the Group's website http://uvpafug.org . For further information contact President Gerhard Ruf at pres@uvpafug.org(801-225-6106), VP1 Elder Don Snow at snowd@math.byu.edu, or VP2 Brian Cooper at vp2@uvpafug.org.