A Glimpse of Family Link Tracker

I think it’s time to blog on what I’ve been working on the past six months. I started out thinking that it would be fun to write a genealogy ebook. But as I did research for the ebook, I realized that it was really annoying keeping track of all the links I was finding. Then I realized that since I was married to a software engineer (Aren’t you just green with jealousy?), I could solve that problem. Or rather, I could tell my husband how to solve my problem.

Thus the idea for Family Link Tracker was born. Right now we’re still in beta testing. In fact, if you want to be a beta tester, let me know. I’m looking for a few folks to install it on their computer (Windows 98 or NT only, please) and let me know what they think. You can contact me at info (at) familylinktracker.com. Of course you’ll receive a free copy of the software, not to mention the genealogy ebook and articles I’m giving away as bonuses when it’s purchased.

Here are ten reasons why I think Family Link Tracker is a great thing if you do a lot of online genealogy research:

1. You can save your links in one place.


2. You can sort your links with one mouse click.


3. You can categorize your links by subject matter (for example: Ireland, Database, Blogs, etc.).


4. You can create your own categories to organize your links.


5. If you come across an interesting link while doing online research, just a click of the mouse will copy and paste the link into Family Link Tracker for later research.


6. You can set up an alarm to remind you to revisit a Web site. This is great for those genealogical sites that are constantly adding new databases.


7. You can keep track of links you don’t want to revisit by rating them from 1 – 10. How annoying is it to keep revisiting lousy Web sites?


8. Store additional information about the link (such as a description and other comments) with the link so you’ll never wonder what it is you’re clicking on.


9. Keep track of the last time you visited a Web site; Family Link Tracker inserts the “Last Visit” date next to the link.


10. You can export your links to HTML or a .txt file to send to other researchers.

So if you’re sick of keeping track of your links with the Favorites feature in Internet Explorer or the Bookmarks feature in Mozilla Firefox, you might want to give Family Link Tracker a try.

I’ll provide more information as I get closer to the official release.

~Mary Kaye