OSX/djvu

I understand that this might be an issue mostly for Swedes but it is still somewhat of a principal issue that I find is very badly handled. In Sweden, important resources for historical research like "Riksarkivet" and "Lantmäteriet" rely on djvu as the image viewer which means using any other operating system than Windows/PC results in additional complexities.

It used to be that you needed special browsers, fiddle around with 32/64 bit versions of software, and things like that in order to get it to work. What I find now is that the support for djvu is so bad in modern versions of OS X it seems basically impossible to get anything to work. In fact, at Lantmäteriet's homepage, the support says

The Swedish text in the box says that for now it is not impossible to install DJVu for Mac and tthey are waiting for feedback from the supplier. This is ridiculous because it basically makes it impossible for now to access any content. Especially bad is that Riksarkivet uses this format for much of their content that is behind a paywall.

Tools I Use

To start the blog off, letting you know what tools I use (and have used) through the years when working through my ancestry seems like a good start. The research was actually started by my father back in the days when you had to order historical documents on microfilm but things are different today.

I started documenting my family tree at ancestry.com and that is still the main site where I enter and keep the information. It is a commercial site, but it is actually quite easy to use and well integrated with lots of databases. I recently also entered my ancestral tree at WikiTree because it is more in line with my principals for sharing information. It is still not as complete or well documented or sourced as the Ancestry.com tree but I am working on it.

For exploring historical documents like parish books, births, deaths, and marriages I rely mostly nowadays on Arkiv Digital, mainly due to the quality of their scans. It is a commercial site but that is acceptable in light of the work done to digitise all the information.