» Genealogy

The look on most faces when you talk about your families’ history? – Bored
The look on people’s faces when you hand them or play your own family history DVD? – Priceless
The smile Grandma would get playing your family history DVD to her friends, showing off her good or bad ancestors? – Priceless
The cost? Nothing

The methods I have used to create my free family history DVD are pretty basic, but the possibilities are endless. I highly recommend playing around with the different settings and options of each program used, as some of the effects can really make your free family history DVD, all that more professional.

Here’s a quick review of how to create your own family history DVD:

Part 1: Using OpenOffice.org Impress to create a free slideshow.

Part 2: Turn your slideshow into a video using free screen recording software. Add voice narration to your recording.

Part 3: How to edit your video files using free editing video software. Edit movies, fix errors in your slideshow, add music or even add voice overs.

Part 4: Looked at how to burn your video files to DVD, capable of playing on a standard DVD player.

You can view all the video tutorials here.

Hope you enjoyed our series on How To Create A Free Family History DVD.

Part 4 DVD Flick | Burn Video Files To DVD

The Mad Genealogist — Wed, 26 May 2010 00:48:35 +0000

In Part 4 of How To Create A Family History DVD, I look at burning your video files to a DVD, capable of playing on a standard DVD player.

Now that we have our slideshow recorded and saved as video files, we need to join them up and convert them to a format a DVD player can read. For this I use a free DVD authoring tool called DVD Flick.

DVD Flick is a free, open-source DVD authoring program that can convert and write almost any video file into a DVD. DVD Flick is designed especially for converting most of your PC video formats to the standard DVD format, so that you can play them on your home DVD player without any problems.

When users want to view video files on their television instead of their computer they can convert the video files and burn them directly onto a DVD. There are many ways to burn video files to DVD, but DVD Flick has to be one of the easiest. It also has a range of other features to make your DVD more professional.

As mentioned in the video here are the links:

Menu Templates

Create Your Own Menu Video

Hope you enjoyed today’s video on DVD Flick and welcome any comments.

Part 3 Using Free Video Editing Software | Create and Edit Movies

The Mad Genealogist — Fri, 21 May 2010 06:47:16 +0000

In Part 3 of How To Create A Family History DVD, I look at how to use free video editing software to edit the video recording of our slideshow presentation.

The video editing software program I use is Windows Movie Maker 2. With Movie Maker you can edit movies, fix errors in your slideshow and add music using free video editing software.

If you don’t want to go through all the hassle of creating a slideshow presentation, Movie Maker also allows us to create a video using just photos or images, where we can add voice-overs or music to create a high quality movie, which we look at the end of today’s video.

Windows Movie Maker is a free video editing program which comes with most new PCs but you can download Movie Maker 2.1 for XP here if needed.

Hope you enjoyed this how to use free video editing software video and welcome any comments.

Part 2 Using Free Screen Recording Software

The Mad Genealogist — Fri, 14 May 2010 00:35:26 +0000

In today’s video, Part 2 of How To Create A Family History DVD, I look at how to set up and record your slideshow presentation using Camstudio, a free screen recording program.

Free screen recording software lets us record the activity on our screen and saves these as video files. It also allows us to use a microphone to add our own audio narrations to any screen recording.

Once we have recorded our slideshow and saved our video files using screen recording software, we can then edit, add voice overs or music to our slideshow using video creating/editing software.

Just a few tips to make sure the screen recording of your slideshow goes smoothly. Write a script and have that in front of you as you narrate your slideshow. If you have two computers you could even have one using a free auto cue program just like real TV. lol.

Also don’t worry about how many video files you create, as we can easily join them up later. I think we used about 15 video files to create just over one hour of my friends family history DVD.

While we have used a free screen recording or screen capture program to record our slideshow presentation, there are also a number of other ways in which you can use free screen recording software.

You can use free screen recording software to create demonstration videos for any software program or create a set of videos answering your most frequently asked questions? You could also also create video tutorials for school and college or even video-based information products you can sell.

Some of the other free screen recording programs you might like to try are, Jing or VirtualDub.

Part 1 of How To Create A Family History DVD can be found here.

Hope you enjoyed today’s video on using free screen recording software and welcome any comments.

Part 1 How To Create A Slideshow Presentation

The Mad Genealogist — Sun, 09 May 2010 03:01:05 +0000

In Part 1 of How To Create A Family History DVD, I look at a few basic tips on just one way to create a slideshow presentation. Once we have completed our slideshow, we can record, add audio and then burn our presentation to create our very own family history DVD.

There are many different ways to create a slideshow that is both informative and entertaining. When you create a slideshow you can include photos, scanned documents such as wedding and birth certificates and screen shots. What types of information you want to include and how far you want to go back is completely up to you.

You can even ask your parents or grandparents to give a talk and record several short audio clips telling their own stories. Later we can add the audio, music and family videos to make our family history DVD. Basically anything and everything.

We used OpenOffice.org Impress to create a slideshow presentation, which is a free software program similar to Microsoft’s PowerPoint. Unlike PowerPoint, Impress is available for free and is just one part of a powerful office suite which you can download here.

If you just want a family history Ebook and do not wish to create a slideshow, you are probably better of using OpenOffice.org Writer, but if you want to create both an Ebook and a DVD, we might as well use Impress as we have probably spent more than enough time creating our slideshow already.

Hope you enjoyed this how to create a slideshow video and welcome any comments.

Create A Free Family Family History DVD

The Mad Genealogist — Thu, 06 May 2010 05:47:59 +0000

Last week, I got a call from a friend wondering if I knew of a way to create a family history DVD, using the collection of documents, images and photographs he had collected over the last few years.

After 5 minutes of further chatting, I then heard one of the sentences I hate the most, “oh and one more thing”. After I paused for effect, he then went on to ask “can it be done for free and is there a chance we could create a family history DVD by Mothers Day? (that’s actually two things, but what’s another favor between friends as they say)

Always up for a challenge I told him to come on over and we’ll see what we could come up with. Then it hit me, Houston we have a problem, what do I know about creating a family history DVD? About the only thing I have in common with Steven Speilberg is the same first name.

Anyway, three days later, we finally finished what we thought was a fairly decent family history DVD and amazingly it was totally free (except for all the hours I put in lol). And funny enough it was fairly easy in the end and I thought I would pass on these methods in a series of videos.

Imagine the pleasure your family might get when you turn up to your next family gathering or family reunion with your very own family history DVD.

Imagine, instead of what some might think as a long boring ramble on your family history, you could play an exciting DVD or hand them a professional looking ebook.

Imagine there’s no… (sorry got carried away a bit then)

Hopefully with the release of our how to create a free family history DVD video tutorials, genealogists will now get even more pleasure from their long, long, long……sometimes endless family history search.

If you miss a tutorial blog post, don’t worry, once each video is completed, you will be able to find all the links on our video tutorials page.

Even if you are into other niches like say internet or affiliate marketing, these videos on how to create a free family history DVD might come in handy, as you can apply the same techniques and create your own how to videos or ebooks.

So if you would like to create your own family history DVD stay tuned. For our first video tutorial, we look at just one way to create a free slideshow presentation.

Genealogy Blogs and The Ancestor Approved Award

The Mad Genealogist — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 01:57:25 +0000

I was reading a interesting post recently over at The Armchair Genealogist about the Ancestor Approved Award and thought it was a great idea and would try my own Top 10.

The Ancestor Approved Award asks that the recipient list ten things they have learned about any of their ancestors that has surprised, humbled, or enlightened them and pass the award along to ten other bloggers who they feel are doing their ancestors proud.

As this is a new genealogy blog and in no way deserving of such an award, instead of passing this award on to ten other genealogy bloggers, The Armchair Genealogist is changing things a little. Lynn wants to hear from new genealogy bloggers who feel they have learned something from their ancestors and are eager to share how they have been surprised, humbled or enlightened by their ancestors during their genealogy research.

My Top 10 so far:

1. I am humbled by my ancestors who fought for Australia during WW1 and WW2.

2. I was surprised that you could find out so much about your ancestors for free online.

3. I was surprised my Dad’s ancestors were Irish and I was able to trace it back to 1765 so

4. I was surprised by the amount of children my ancestors had. A lot of the families had between 6 and 11 children in what seemed like tough times.

5. I was surprised that there are many weird links from my ancestors to my own life and hobbies. I was a metal worker and my mother’s grandfather was a boiler maker (similar job only boiler makers use thicker metal). I read a lot of true war stories and military intelligence novels and my mother’s father was a leading coder in the Australian Navy for 20 years including during WW2. I also like reading about escape stories and on my father’s side, my great great grandmother’s father was a Australian convict who apparently liked to escape. Told you it was weird.

6. I am thrilled to know I have Australian convict ancestors. To many Australians, this is Australian royalty.

7. I am enlightened to know that even having been convicts, my great great great grandparents ended up doing all right and passed on a religious background to their daughter.

8. I am humbled by the causes of death of many of my ancestors by diseases that are so commonly
treatable now.

9. I am enlightened by the attitude of my great great grandfather Thomas Laughton. After losing three young children to respiratory failure and even being investigated, they moved from Melbourne to Lakes Entrance, Victoria, where he open the first hotel in the district.

10. I am humbled by all the help I have received from the genealogy community and genealogy forums when I first started researching my family tree.

Free Family Tree Maker

The Mad Genealogist — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 23:04:08 +0000

When I first started compiling my family tree, it was the old way, with pen and paper. While this might be a good way to begin, after a while I needed to use a family tree maker program to create a GED file. I could then upload the GED file to genealogy sites like Ancestry.com or RootsWeb for all the world to see and hopefully get in touch with unknown relatives.

Being the old scrooge that I am, it not only had to be easy to use, it also had to be a free family tree maker. After trying a number of free family tree maker downloads, I could not decide on a winner, so I use two different free family tree maker programs.

Free Family Tree Maker Starter Edition The Family Tree Maker Starter Edition has limited features, but it has everything to help you create a GED file for you to upload. This was the easiest free family tree maker to use.

MyHeritage Family Tree Builder A bit more advanced but some of the free features really blew me away. Creates great PDF books, reports and charts.

Other free family tree makers available are Legacy 7.4 Family Tree and Gramps.

Another nice free program I came across was UncleGED. This is a free GEDCOM-to-HTML conversion tool that will allow you create web pages to show off the family history data that you have collected and exported to GEDCOM files.

You can see a example of UncleGED pages here

New Genealogy and Family Search Blog

The Mad Genealogist — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:59:29 +0000

Welcome to my new genealogy blog, TheMadGenealogist.com

As this is the first post, I thought I would just write a quick preview of what this genealogy blog will be about.

The MadGenealogist will not just be a personal genealogy blog where I write about my own family ancestry. While this blog will contain posts on my own family search, it will also be about the journey, looking at how I went about tracing my family tree.

Starting out trying to trace your family tree can sometimes be a daunting task, so we will also cover genealogy info and tips, family search websites and family tree software.

Basically, anything to do with genealogy.