Clooz 4 is the most significant enhancement in the program’s 25-year history, continuing its rich tradition of providing a document-centric approach to family history research. Totally rewritten, Clooz 4 is full of strong features assisting researchers plan and track their efforts, record source citations, extract and analyze information content, and then export evidence to other family tree programs. Clooz 4 goes beyond researching people, supporting research subjects such as businesses, buildings, ships and artifacts. This new version provides a solid base for further expansion in the years to come. Report generation is more powerful and flexible than ever before, giving you additional control of the report content. In addition to reports, you can now directly output records to Excel files.
Author Archives: ancsysrdt
Free Updates — Annual Renewal of Update Support is terminated [2 August 2017]
Future software updates to Clooz (including and through version 4) will now be free of charge for all users who had active update support as of July 23, 2016, or purchased Clooz after that date. It is no longer necessary to annually renew update support. Development of the next major release of Clooz, Version 4, has taken much longer than anticipated, and updates have been slow in coming. Ancestral Systems will now return to the more common practice of charging for major upgrades, beginning with Version 5.
Users whose update support had expired prior to July 23, 2016, will need to purchase a new license in order to receive future updates. Contact support@clooz.com to obtain a discount.
Clooz versions 3.5.24 and later will recognize existing serial numbers and this change in policy. Always use the latest serial number you were issued.
Stay tuned
Articles will be posted here regarding how to perform certain tasks with Clooz.
Interfacing Clooz Documents with your Family Tree
Example of the Document Export form
Data Transfer Manager window (bulk transfers)
Clooz Reporting Features
Sample reports
Clooz’s Unique Analysis Tools (Coming soon)
The Analysis Pivot Grid
The Analysis Pivot Grid tool provides a powerful and intuitive interface for you to display, organize, and analyze various combinations of the Sources, Information Records, events and family groups entered into Clooz. The pivot grid offers dynamic filtering, sorting, grouping and summarization capabilities to help you easily uncover patterns and insight into your data. Look for migration patterns or assess the coverage of your research in various locations or time frames. The possibilities are endless.
Early Census Review
Early U.S. censuses (prior to 1850) and several Canadian censuses only identify the head of household and provide counts of persons living in the household. The Early Census tool in Clooz provides a way to compare the household counts across multiple years, or between different households in the same year. Clooz uses a display layout developed by J. Mark Lowe presented at a National Genealogical Society conference in 2013.
Subject Comparison Window
Often when you are gathering documentation in your research you may not be convinced that the documentation you have found applies to the person your are researching. The names might be the same, but proving that identities match requires a bit more review. It’s advisable to create new Subject records for persons when you are not sure it’s the same person as represented by another Subject record. The Subject Comparison tool in Clooz allows you to compare all the information you have collected for different Subjects to determine if they are indeed the same person, or perhaps have some relationship between them (such as parent or child).
Clooz’s Composite View
The Composite View is an alternate display format to the standard table-like grid. It presents documents and people in a tree-like structure allowing the researcher to examine possible relationships between the people in a document. But this doesn’t stop with just one document, but includes all of the documents for a given person. Then, the Composite View goes on to show all the people in in each of those documents, and so forth, up to 5 layers deep. This results in the display of a network of people connected through documents. It’s an excellent way to begin to identify friends, acquaintances, and neighbors, a good starting point for identifying further family relationships.
Document Templates
Sample Document Template - 1920 U.S. Census
Sample non-tabular style documents
