For help with GEDSpy, see the help file that was included with the download.  Press F1 from within GEDSpy for help.

If you have questions, comments or feedack of any kind, feel free to email by clicking the button below.  

If you are testing GEDSpy and would like to report an error, please use the same link below.

Version 0.9 resulted in significant code restructuring.  Note that this may have introduced new bugs.  If you find something that doesn't seem to work quite right, please report it using the email link below.

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The Past, Present and Future of GEDSpy:
22 August 2013

I saw a review of GEDSpy 0.9a on Tamura Jones's website that reminded me how much work I still have to do on this program.  I know it has memory issues.  I also know what the fix is, but it is going to take more time than I have right now to implement it.

I work on GEDSpy in my spare time.  For the past year I have had almost zero spare time due to a huge project at work and other family commitments.  I love GEDSpy - it has so much potential!  I have a huge list of TO-DOs queued up for it, including Unicode/UTF-8 support, international language customization, lots of new core genealogy and reporting features and functionality, etc.  In the best scenario I can imagine, it will be well into 2014 before I can get back to working on it with any sense of regularity.

When I started this program, it was a command-line based Rexx program, whose purpose was to help me address some of the shortcomings of how my main genealogy program, The Family Edge Plus (TFE+), handles sources.  The more I got into the source-management part of the process, the more I realized the potential for this to be a really useful utility.

If you are at all familiar with TFE+ you know that it was written for DOS in 1989-90, which by any standards is old, and by computing standards, is pre-historic.  But I love it, and I am generally change-averse by nature anyway.  

As an aside...  For those die-hards like me who refuse to give up on TFE+ but want to run it on Win 7, or even Mac or Linux, check out DosBox, a free, open-source DOS emulator for 64-bit operating systems, and not limited to Windows!  

Also for those searching for the author of TFE, Carl York, I heard he was killed in a car crash several years ago, but have not been able to confirm that.  I very much wish I had the TFE+ source code, so I could write a utility to read the files and import them directly into GEDSpy without having to export to GEDCOM first.  But I digress...

Anyway, TFE+ is fast. portable, and easy to use, but it is lacking in features by today's standards, and its source management is horrendous by any standards.  I used to have another program called GED*Mate, later Corel Family Publisher, which has since been discontinued or bought up by another company, I don't know.  Anyway, that program sort of gave me the idea for the reporting piece of GEDSpy.  I learned by brute force analysis how to write RTF so the reports would look good in MS Word.  (Note, as with most things Microsoft, RTF does not port well to other word processor programs).  So GEDSpy has evolved from just being a source-helper into a reporting tool, and a search engine as well.  My main objective for the Register report is to help write my family history book.  The search engine, combined with the tagging feature, has helped me find, group and sort people I already had in the files, by just about any criteria imaginable.

I never set out to make GEDSpy the next best thing in Genealogy software.  I wrote it to make my life easier, and I put it on the web in case there were others who could benefit from it as well. My family tree file has about 6,000 carefully researched individuals in it.  The biggest file I could find to test with has about 42,000 individuals and is about 23MB in size.  When I say GEDSpy loads "a gazillion times faster", you should have seen it before!  It was a Gazillion times slower!  As for the icon, what can I say?  I'm a programmer, not an artist.  If someone wants to design an icon for GS, please feel free to do so and send it to me.  I'd be happy to give credit where its due, as long as the price is right (i.e., free :)

So for now, enjoy GEDSpy and feel free to comment and give feedback. I just ask for your patience and understanding if I don't get the changes made in a respectable time.

-Jeff Aylor
August 2013

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Known Bugs:
(as of version v0.9a)

• [#15] When Exiting with Tags set, it asks to save tag list.  Click Yes, and it exits without saving.  This occurs sporadically.  Most times it works fine.
• [#16] GEDSplitter tool doesn't copy REPO tags.  [Note, GEDSplitter functionality changed as of v0.9. Some parts may not work as expected - needs extensive testing]
• [#22] Sometimes printing footnotes is interpreted by MS Word as Endnotes (on the Register report) and vice-versa.  This is a bug in Word, not in GEDSpy.  GEDSpy writes RTF to spec.  The work around is to go in Word to Insert/Reference/Footnote.  Select either Endnote or Footnote (whichever you want) and also check the Number Format box to make sure it is what you want it to be.  Click OK and it will change your entire document.
• [#29] In Text Viewer, when switching from Source View to Citation View, or vice versa, it sometimes hides the Windowshade button.  You can still click it, and when you do it becomes visible.
• [#31] Relationship Finder doesn't work when the line would match on a person who was married twice and one line came from each spouse.
• [#37] Search Results View sort order is not always maintained when it is refreshed.