Personal Ancestry Writer II is a free genealogy application that is based on the Personal Ancestral File by the Mormon Church.

Personal Ancestry Writer II combines most of the features of the LDS Personal Ancestral File program (PAF) for the Macintosh (for which all development stopped a few years ago after release 2.3.1), with additional features that generate web pages (in HTML), word processing files (in RTF for, e.g., AppleWorks) and desktop publishing files (in MML for FrameMaker).

The generated report files include genealogical dictionaries, registers, ahnentafels and lineages-such as appear on this site-as well as some interesting text files and pedigree charts.

PAWriter also provides flexible selection of subsets of people in a file by "tagging" them (marking them as members of the subset) using a host of selection criteria. Selections include inclusion ( ), exclusion (-) and intersection (*) of the set of people meeting the criteria with those already tagged.

Consider PAWriter to be a possible next step in the development of Macintosh PAF had its develpment not been discontinued after release 2.3.1, i.e., "what might have been."

PAWriter is not meant to have the bells and whistles that are in the current crop of genealogical programs. The emphasis is on maintaining a genealogical database from which the user can write books and/or post web pages about a family.

Requirements:

· G3/G4/G5/Intel processor running at 300 MHz or faster (1 GHz or faster for very large files)
· At least 64 MB of free RAM.
· At least an 800 x 600 color monitor (at least 1024 x 768 when using rollover help).

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· The limitation on list boxes of a maximum of 30,000 entries at a time is now removed. All entries are now displayed. This applies to when the Find Person button is clicked (or command-F is pressed or Person menu > Find Person by Name is chosen); when the Find Tagged button is clicked (or option-command-F is pressed or Person menu > Find Tagged Person by Name is chosen); when Edit menu > Copy Name, Tag menu > Tag People whose Names Contain, or Tag Menu > Tag People with a Place Containing is chosen, as well as for the list of citations displayed when Citation menu > Edit Citations is chosen. You can still type the first few letters (or more) of an entry and press tab to jump to the first entry in the list that starts with those letters.
· The Reference Guide was updated to remove references to the above list limitations, and to add an explanation of marriage intentions to the topic Basic Data Entry > Dates.
· As stated in the Reference Guide: "To ensure HTML reports, HTML web sites and Show Scrapbook in the file menu work properly, make sure your picture file names use only alphanumeric characters [i.e., plain ASCII letters and digits], dashes (-), underscores (_), periods (.) and spaces. It's also OK to use plus signs (+) and dollar signs ($), but their usage is generally rare." (See BNF definitions of alpha, digit and safe characters in a URL in [url]http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt[/url , page 19, to which is added a space character.) Now, if you add a picture file to a wallet whose name contains a character other than those specified above, or open such a picture file in a wallet, a warning will be displayed pointing out that character. Such a picture file may or may not be displayed when referenced in HTML.
· Titles at the head of HTML reports that contain non-ASCII characters are now displayed correctly.