Thanks for writing.

You are right that the 300-year-old tree should have been transcribed into a software package.

However, the incident in question occured in the 1950s, before the Internet and before genealogy software packages. The option did not exist back then, and the document was not in my possession.

The moral of the story is that if someone has such a document or collection of documents, make sure to photograph each page digitally, transcribe the details, make scanned copies of the documents and share them with numerous family members with an eye to preserving the information.

Schelly