Dear Scott & Barb
Many thanks for your reply. I have tried two free trials of software and neither of them were completely right. They both had good parts and bad parts, as you said, but neither of them did everything, perhaps I expected too much!
I must admit that my stuff in excel has three backups and I haven't thrown a piece of paper or handwritten note away in 20 years, so I am pretty well covered, I hope! I am about to get my own office and have the time to get my stuff organised at last, instead of having to unpack it all then repack it everytime I want to do anything. You know how it is.
What I take from your message, and thanks for thinking long and hard before possibly putting me off(!), is be organised with the paperwork and use the software as a tool, almost a backup, not the primary information filing system. I think the fact that my trees are in excel in a certain format which suits me, means I should stick to that and put the bare bones on the tree and be organised with the supporting paperwork. Good. I am comfortable with that.
So, my follow-up question is, how to organise files? My instinct is by family, then by person, but am not sure how that works with women who married. I would also like to have a way of saying for example 'Where was everyone in 1881?', so do you then have a person broken down by BMD, then census, then probate and so on.
This may be a post for another board, but thanks for setting my thoughts straight,
Regards
Andrea