Personal Ancestral File

» see familysearch.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Genealogy as a hobby with dedicated software attached is a fairly American arrangement, and genealogy as a religious duty with dedicated software attached is narrower still. Personal Ancestral File was never going to arrive anywhere near me. It shipped in April 1984 on machines I would not touch for another decade, from an institution whose reasons for building it belong entirely to that institution.

The distance is also structural rather than only personal. Turkish surnames date to a 1934 law that required every family to pick one, so the paper trail this kind of software is designed to walk backward through simply does not run the same way here. A program built to chase family lines across four hundred years of Anglo-American parish records is answering a question that is not shaped like the question people ask in Turkey.

So this is an outside account of a piece of software that 3.2 million people got hold of. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built it because the church has a doctrinal interest in identifying ancestors, which means it needs enormous quantities of family data typed into a structured form by ordinary members. In 1984 there was no reasonable way for those members to do that, so the church wrote the tool and sold it for thirty five dollars.

~ the case file ~

~ why a church wrote software ~

Version 1.0 had no GEDCOM support because GEDCOM did not exist yet in usable form. PAF 2.0 in 1986 carried an early draft of the GEDCOM 2.0 spec, and later releases moved up through 4.0 and then 5.5. That matters more than anything else in this grave. GEDCOM is the interchange format the entire genealogy industry still runs on, and it came out of the same organization that wrote PAF. PAF is the program that put the format in front of a mass audience and made every competitor support it.

It started on DOS and the Apple II and ended up on Windows and Mac OS X, with a Palm OS companion from version 5.0 onward. From PAF 4.0 in 1999 it was free. A church giving away competent desktop software for fifteen years is an odd thing on its own, and it did to the paid genealogy market roughly what you would expect free software from a well-funded institution to do.

~ the eleven dead years ~

PAF 5.2 came out on 23 July 2002 and was the last version ever released. FamilySearch left the download link and the help pages sitting there, and did not ship a single update for the following eleven years, across three Windows releases, while an entire generation of genealogy software grew up around it doing online sync and shared trees that PAF structurally could not do.

People kept using it anyway, in very large numbers, because it worked and because their data was already in it. That is the whole reason the shutdown was news. Software that is merely unmaintained is not dead as long as it opens, and PAF opened fine.

~ what carried over ~

In June 2013 FamilySearch announced that from 15 July the program would be retired, with no more downloads and no more support. It pointed users at a short list of third-party replacements led by RootsMagic and Legacy Family Tree, both with free tiers, both able to import PAF files and sync with FamilySearch Family Tree. Nobody's data was destroyed. Copies on hard drives kept working, and some of them are presumably still working today.

The retirement was an admission rather than an event. What actually happened is that a 2002 desktop program could not be extended into a world of shared online trees, and the organization that owned it had already moved the real work onto the web. Announcing a shutdown eleven years after the last release is a strange kind of honesty, and it is more honesty than most of the graves on this site ever got.

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