Let’s Get Personal

At work one day back in 1981 I received a phone call from Russ Borneman, who worked in the Human Resources Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He asked me if I would consider accepting employment with the Church. After some consideration, I accepted that offer. He asked me how soon I could begin working for them, and I told him I would need a month to finish the project I was working on at Utah State University.

At the end of that month, I showed up at the Church Office Building. It was then I learned that the project manager for whom I was going to work was no longer employed by the Church, and the project which I had been hired to work on was no longer a project. I spent lots of time reading manuals, and wondering if I had made a major mistake in my life. One morning my new manager (Lynn Warr?) came to my office and asked me to attend a meeting with 4 other programmers. When I got to the meeting, three of the programmers were already there. The last to arrive was Robert Foster. Bob was the lead programmer on the soon to begin Personal Ancestral File project. His first question was, “Brethren, how are we going to implement lineage-linking on a home computer?” My first question, which I was too embarrassed to ask, was “What is lineage-linking?”

I was on the PAF team for only a short time while they were finding a project they really wanted me to work on. After I left the PAF project, I followed their project from a distance. When they were near production, they asked for volunteers to test the product. They wanted Personal Ancestral File to run on many different types of home computers, so they were looking for as many different types of computers as they could get in the test. By then I had purchased a Franklin Ace 1000 computer. It was a clone of the Apple II computer. It had two floppy disk drives, and I bought a video card which allowed me to convert from the standard Apple 40 column screen to the 80 column screen which was necessary to run PAF.

On my Franklin I could print the information from a particular address in the ROM chip, and it contained a copyright notice from Apple Computer Company. The Franklin was a better computer than the Apple II, In My Humble Opinion, but since Franklin stole the ROM from Apple, they eventually went out of business after the lawsuit.

When I finished my testing of PAF, I wrote a report on what worked or did not work to my satisfaction, and a list of things I would like to see before PAF went into production.

I think the beta test convinced the Church that they couldn’t support all of the different types of computers on the market, meaning the different operating systems. The final product worked only on PC-DOS and MS-DOS operating systems, meaning the IBM PC and IBM clones. At the Church, we had some of the old IBM portable (luggable) PCs available, and I hauled one from and to work several times while I played with the program. I eventually bought an Epson Equity II computer, with the optional, and at that time massive, 40 Megabyte hard disk. I was in Heaven.

I kept a spreadsheet with a list of the features I wanted to see in PAF, and periodically I would submit it to the PAF team. When I left Church employment in 1992, PAF included 17 of my suggestions.

In February of 2010 I started volunteering at the Ogden FamilySearch Library. I noticed an icon on the computer screen which I didn’t recognize. I clicked on it, and it started the Ancestral Quest program. It looked and felt familiar, even though I had never seen Ancestral Quest before. I asked whether the FamilySearch Library had a class on Ancestral Quest, and they told me that they had a teacher, but he was unlikely to return because of health issues.

I had few options available. I asked if I could teach the class. That was my way of learning AQ.

Some History

The time came when the Church decided it was necessary to switch PAF from a DOS based program to a Windows based program, to keep up with the operating system which they believed would eventually overshadow PCDOS/MSDOS. PAF 3.0 could run on Windows, but it was totally designed for PCDOS/MSDOS. My opinion is that the Church had 4 options available to them at that point.

1. They could train their DOS programmers to write Windows code.
2. They could hire Windows programmers to replace their DOS programmers.
3. They could hire Windows programmers to work with their DOS programmers.
4. They could find a Windows program which already worked with Church specific information.

They chose the 4th option. They found Gaylon Findlay and Ancestral Quest. Gaylon allowed them to alter the source code for Ancestral Quest, and release it as PAF version 4.0 for Windows. That’s why AQ looked and felt so familiar.

After I had been teaching Ancestral Quest for some time I had former students asking how to do particular things in AQ which I had not covered in the class. When I answered their questions I wished that I had a way to let other former students know what questions were being asked, and what the answers were. That was the reason I started AQ Will Do. It teaches the things AQ Will Do, and how to do them.

I taught the AQ class for 6 years. I no longer teach the class, but I still post on AQ Will Do occasionally. If there are topics you would like to see discussed, please leave a Comment or email me at dcmc1945@gmail.com.

Updated: 2023-11-20

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