Bill's Genealogy Blog

Bill Buchanan is a long-time genealogy enthusiast, living in Spruce Grove, Alberta, Canada. This blog will describe my experiences as I research my family history and help others.

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Location: Spruce Grove, Alberta, Canada

I am a retired online school teacher. I love family history. From 2007-2020, I spent much of my time providing part-time support for the world's largest free family history site https://familysearch.org This is very rewarding. I have helped others with the Family Tree and related FamilySearch products.
In 2010-2018 I served in the Edmonton_Alberta_Riverbend_Family_History_Centre..I have a FHC blog at Bill's Family History Center Blog Since 2020 I have been a family history consultant for Edmonton Alberta North Stake. For information on the Latter-day Saints and family history click https://www.comeuntochrist.org/

Friday, May 18, 2012


Follow-up On PAF and Android

I received this reply "Bill, this is quite interesting. We just got android phones last week and it would be neat to have my PAF genealogy literally at my fingertips.


"I don't find the place to create the html version of my database. Is this done within PAF software? This is new to me, but I'm a very experience PAF user so obviously I'm overlooking something somewhere."

"Will I be able to scroll through the database, read my notes, and view pedigrees of all the individuals?"


In reply I wrote the following ...

You will be able to read all of your notes and there are links to parents and children, but no pedigree charts.

To create an HTML version of your PAF data, open the data file in PAF and then click Tools menu > Create Web Page > Selected Individuals > Select > All > OK > Next > input a name in the Description field > Finish.


PAF will offer to let you view your new PAF website in your default browser. Please do that so you will see what it looks like.

PAF will generate the website (a folder with hundreds of HTML files). The default location for the website folder is the "web" folder in your Windows MyDocuments (or Documents) folder. The name of the folder will be whatever name you put in the Description field when you generated the website.

Getting the website to your Android phone becomes the next obstacle. My tablet comes with a USB cable that I plug into my Windows PC, so I can easily copy the website folder to my tablet. If your phone has a USB cable, use it. If it doesn't have a USB cable, maybe you can use Dropbox to copy it to your phone. i.e. Copy the website folder to the Dropbox folder on your PC and wait for it to synchronize with the Dropbox server, then open the Dropbox folder on your phone. (Make sure that the same Dropbox account is used on both devices.) Failing that, maybe you can Zip the folder and email it from the PC to the Andoid phone, then save and unzip it on the phone.

On my tablet I need to use the little free app "OpenHtml" to view the website created by PAF, otherwise the links don't work. But using this app, I can view the info on any of the 23,000+ in my PAF data file. Since this "website" is only accessible by me, I don't bother to filter out any private information. Now, if I had a better index, to avoid all that scrolling and swishing ...


Bill Buchanan

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