I see that Clooz 2.0 is undergoing beta testing. Clooz is billed as a “electronic filing cabinet that assists you with search and retrieval of important facts you have found during the ancestor hunt” by its developers, and they’ve certainly added a few interesting things.
Three things about this new version of Clooz caught my eye (and they certainly helped me decide to add this to my collection of genealogy software):
1)Mapping. I think that within a few years, all major genealogy applications should have some kind of mapping features, or at least the ability to interact with the various online mapping resources. While I use now use a Mac most of the time, I have Windows-based genealogy software that I can’t let go of. I was at a “gathering”, if you will, of Mac users, and one was showing me MacFamilyTree (MacGenealogy.org) and specifically they were showing me the map feature. I was very impressed. I’ve talked about this before, and I’ve seen an online demonstration of somebody using Google Maps with their website (they were using The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding) and in addition had the Google Maps thing somewhat integrated with their site – very neat).
2)Business/Business history related records. I think that as people dig up more information, they are going to want to keep more of that information, and Clooz has specific features to track business histories, or employment, and this could be a nice feature if you have a family-owned business.
3)House/Structural genealogy and history. This could also tie into the mapping I mentioned above, as people do like to go and look and see where their ancestors lived.
I’m very interested in mapping software for many reasons:
- * Cemeteries – tracking which one is where
* Homesteads – where people settle
* Migrations – how far people moved
It’s one thing to see a list of locations that somebody lived in. It’s quite another to see, on a map, that between 1805 and 1830 they moved from Virginia to Tennessee to Arkansas to Texas. You don’t think about the distances involved and the territory and terain until you see on a map, an approximation of where they lived.
Clooz is shaping up to be pretty cool, and once 2.0 comes out I hope to give a try and do a review. The beta is free and open to anybody right now, and stops functioning around the middle of April.
From: Genealogy Software News