She has served at the BYU Family History Center for many years as a Consultant, Teacher, and Family History Missionary Trainer.
Laurie Werner Castillo is a mother and grandmother first, and then a professional genealogy researcher, speaker, and free-lance writer. This presentation will show some of the family history items available at the HBLL, as well as on its website. The family history section of the HBLL was recently designated as a Family History Library, so it is no longer a Family History Center, but a branch of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.
The HBLL website contains a wealth of valuable digital collections with many items of interest to family historians. Additionally, it provides an Interlibrary Loan service for patrons to see books from other libraries. Lee Library (HBLL) is a major university library with 5 levels of books, manuscript collections, periodicals, maps and gazetteers, photographs, and displays. The main presentation will be by Laurie Werner Castillo on FAMILY HISTORY RESEARCH AT BYU: THE OTHER FAMILY HISTORY LIBRARY. The next regular, second-Saturday-of-the-month meeting of the Utah Valley PAF (Personal Ancestral File) Users Group will be on Saturday,, from 9 am until noon in the LDS "Red" Chapel at 4000 North Timpview Drive (650 East), in Provo. Email me, if you need further information. Ward newsletter editors, please include in your newsletters parts of the first paragraph and mention that there are classes for everyone. There's no assurance that any product or company will be viable over the medium-, let alone long-, term.Journalists, please run this as a news item and/or in your calendar of events.
Look at mighty and the number of software products it has killed by buying up the rights and then dropping them sooner or later. So what does that say about RM going or not going the way of TMG? Probably not much. But there is no evidence that they are bringing any more resources to bear on it than they did in 2007-2009 when developing RM4.
Explains why we have heard Bruce say that this upgrade to RM8 is the most challenging they have ever faced. None of that existed in the upgrade from the xBase RM3 to the SQLite RM4. Moreover, the addition of interactive connectivity with Ancestry, FamilySearch, FindMyPast and MyHeritage has proved to be volatile and makes RM7 vulnerable to changes on the other side necessitating development effort to stay abreast.
While the concept of a unified development platform from which they can compile Windows and Mac products from a common base sounds good, I'll bet they have run into lots of "gotchas" they are having to resolve, among which may be bugs in the platform itself, inability to reuse 3rd party modules from RM7 which they have to replace, etc.
As for the pressure of adding a native MacOS version of RM to the portfolio, there is no question that the required upgrade from an obsolete development platform has presented them with many challenges. When asked about a succession plan a few years ago, Bruce assured us there was one in place that would continue the products beyond him. So RootsMagic Inc is not a one-man band nor is it a mid-sized company. Jackson Anderson is another who appears on the fb page and a few more handle calls, perhaps dividing their time between Sales and Support. On the Support front, there must be a handful of people, the most visible of which is Renee Zamora who moderates both the Forums and the Facebook page. They have occasionally engaged other developers for specific tasks, e.g., Bruce's son Alan for one of the iterations of Publish Online (7-8 years ago) and somebody else for the RootsMagic iOS/Android app there may have been others. are the President, founder and chief architect Bruce Buzbee and the Vice-President Michael Booth who I think developed the Personal Historian and Family Atlas products before merging with RM. Two publicly engaged executive who divide their time among software development, marketing, documentation, admin. What developer resource is visible for the privately owned RootsMagic Inc is pretty small. How the technology of and market for personal genealogical/family history products and services will evolve is quite unclear and may be a bigger factor than the size of any one company. We all hope that RootsMagic Inc can persist with good developments, products and customer support for a long time to come.