Death of a Great Genealogy Program

I am incredibly sad to learn today that Ohana Software is shutting its doors for good. John Vilburn and company created a platform of wonderful, easy to use, intuitive products for the genealogy market. Tied to efficiently and easily work within the LDS Church's Personal Ancestral File, easily the dominant software (longevity, free, intuitive), FamilyInsight and its predecessor programs, worked seamlessly uploading and downloading data from the various databases housed on the LDS' FamilySearch.

Alas, when the LDS Church's genealogy gurus decided to be all things to all people (and marry itself to Ancestry.com), there were Tron-esque casualties in the cyber war: notably Personal Ancestral File itself. Ohana Software, tied so closely to PAF, has now become one of those casualties. The "new and (not) improved" Family Tree is just so anxious to be all things (a memory and stories repository, photo repository, blah blah blah) that, in my opinion, they have forgotten their core purpose: uploading, downloading, processing and sharing, data. Even with third party software, it is still exceptionally cumbersome, slow and lethargic to up and download basic data facts: the who, what, when, and where of a person. You've heard me rant before: data which used to take me 30 minutes to upload now take a minimum of 4 hours. Data which used to take 2 hours to process now takes the better part of 8 hours. 

It's ridiculous. And it makes you want to give up genealogy, unless your sole purpose in researching your family's history is simply to find or post stories and photos--kind of like an eternal Facebook. 

Sigh. I lived in and held on to eternal hope that Ohana would be able to come out with a program which works with that behemoth, Family Tree. It's going to be irritating to have to go through the process of buying, learning and researching multiple software programs to do what I need to do, efficiently and effectively. Drop a bazillion pound weight and steamroll over my soul why don't you? It would be less painless.

At this point, all I feel like doing is allowing this post to degenerate into name-calling, so I'm going to end with the public announcement from Ohana Software.

Rest In Peace, Ohana. You truly were family.

Aloha and Mahalo from Ohana Software

Ohana Software is closing. We at Ohana Software have enjoyed working with you these past 12 years. FamilyInsight has returned to its original purpose as a clean up tool. There are several choices of programs that will work with FamilySearch Family Tree. They each have different features. Some will download from FamilySearch Family Tree, Sync your records with FamilySearch, Add records to Family Tree , update your records etc. Visit https://familysearch.org/products/ to see all of the products that work with FamilySearch Family Tree. There is now a version of FamilyInsight that just has the clean up tools and comparison modes. You can also convert to different formats. As we are closing there will be no further support for FamilyInsight, or any other programs that we have sold in the past. We are putting a new version of FamilyInsight on http://ohanasoftware.wix.com/familyinsight and it will be available to anyone. The license key is on the webpage. Due to changes made on FamilySearch on 21 Aug 2014 FamilyInsight no longer signs into FamilySearch so modes requiring that will no longer connect.