Irene Eng
Google
I’m a genealogist: visiting this famous genealogy center sits on the top of my to do list during this trip. ... and I found my great grandfather! I've heard that they've acquired (or bought) many Chinese family trees from China.
Impressed by the size of the library and massive staff, but stunned at their software: it's fatal that it can't handle non-English characters, given that they collect family trees around the world. For Chinese, it's imperative to be able to display Chinese characters because pinyin is inadequate: one of the family, two children's names have identical pinyin spelling (of course, their names have different characters).
An old genealogy program, PGV, which was developed by a group of volunteers, handles foreign characters (non-26-alphabet) smoothly. I've been using it.
They offer free printing on heavy, glossy paper, which looks great. However, I'd rather have them improve the software program to serve a broader range of languages, which is more meaningful.
The Log Home is being renovated.