Where do you work and what is your role? Hi my name is Joe Flint. I have been retired for the past 4 years.I was a programmer for an insurance company. My interest in GIS comes from my hobby, Genealogy. In the study of family history we have tools that let us record what and when something happened in the past. We can even record where something happened as text. What I want to do with GIS is to analyze the relationship between places. For example Why did John Smith marry Jane Doe? In the 19th century your prospective partner was probably within walking or at least horseback distance. What I am trying to do is Historical GIS on an individual basis. What GIS success have you had this year and what product did you use? My greatest GIS success this year has been finding ArcGIS for Personal Use. I started out with Google Earth. I soon realized that there was a lot of data out there in shape file format. I tried a free GIS and then a middle priced GIS not wanting to spend the money for ArcGIS. Finding that I could get the real deal for a very affordable price was great. One of the landmarks that can persist through time are rivers and streams. I now have a map populated from the USGS NHD of all the named streams in the USA. I now understand why one ancestor has been reported living in two counties at once. The deed says he lived on Naked Creek and there are two Naked Creeks one in each county. What is your expertise (GIS related or not), and how can that help the community? While I started out as a mainframe COBOL programmer, the last 15 years of my career where spent working in Visual Basic and especially C# and SQL Server. I am hoping to use my programming skills to automate the process of displaying the land purchased in the US public land states by specific individuals.
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