New skills can help search family history

May 24 2008 Liverpool Daily Post

SEARCHING through your family tree is certainly much easier now the digital revolution has taken research to another level.

Here’s a selection of six gadgets that’ll help you with your historical research:

SCAN, DON’T SCRIBE: Docupen R700 – £129.99 from www.scanningpens.co.uk

With a single swipe over your page of interest, this portable scanning unit downloads all the text and graphics directly to your PC for further perusal later.

It also has an internal memory with enough space for around a hundred pages if you can’t take your laptop with you to the records office.

WORDS AND PICTURES: Sony ICD CX50 – £218.55 from www.iboxav.co.uk – this is certainly pricey, but with an internal memory capable of storing over 90 hours of transcription, combined with a camera allowing you to create visual tags to accompany your voice recordings, this could well be an utterly invaluable tool.

WANDER WORRY FREE: Magellan Triton 200 – £117 from www.pixmania.co.uk

The more adventurous genealogists will no doubt end up hiking far away from public record offices in their quest to uncover the past, and this is the perfect tool to ensure you get from A to B and back again with the minimum of fuss.

It’s easily pocketable, waterproof, with a large screen, compass and complete with a full set of European maps.

CHART CREATOR: Family Tree Maker 2008 – £19.95 from www.my-history.co.uk

All your hard work shouldn’t be consigned to a tatty piece of paper or embedded on a sub-standard program. What you need is software that really brings your efforts to life.

Add audio, images and video to your family tree and open relevant pages at the touch of a button, possibly the easiest-to-use piece of software we’ve seen.

TRANSFORM TINY TYPEFACES: Rectangular Magnifier – £4.99 from www.maplin.co.uk

There are many magnifying glasses of the circular variety, but the shape of this model makes it perfect for reading pages continuously.

It also has the added benefit of a light source to improve visibility in those darkened library rooms.

CARRY MORE DATA: Sony Micro Vault Mini 8GB – £30 from www.pixmania.co.uk

With a portable memory stick, you can load up all of your photos, files and software without the need to carry around your computer from place to place – and still have all your research at hand.

There are plenty of these mini USB drives around that just plug into your PC, but few of them have the space to store quite as much data as this one from Sony.