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History of Custodian by Sonja Smith

The concept for Custodian was first developed in 1997 when my one-name study was still relatively young. Whilst using Excel and Word was just about adequate for organising similar information, it was not satisfactory for the wide variety of sources and the volume of information I was beginning to gather. There appeared to be nothing in the marketplace which was designed specifically for dealing with amounts of unrelated, or minimally related, family history data. My husband, Phil, was an analyst programmer at the time and offered to write something if I gave him a design specification and so the concept of the first version came about. It occurred to us that others might also find such a program useful and by spring 1998, Custodian was on the market.

As soon as people began to use it, feedback came rolling in. Lots of ideas and wish lists were received and it soon became clear that many people had been waiting for something like Custodian for a long time. Custodian II was released just one year later in 1999 and incorporated many of the new ideas and requests, along with greater functionality and smoother data entry. For the next five years Custodian II didn’t stop being developed; more new users coming on board brought more and more requests and ideas.

Custodian II was hugely popular but it was becoming increasingly difficult to improve the ageing code. Hence the complete re-write and release of Custodian 3 in 2003. With its new look and more features and forms, version 3 is proving to be just as popular as its predecessor, though there are still many, many users of Custodian II for whom the software does all they require! Almost nine years later and we are still developing new ideas, though sometimes now enlist the help of our very computer-literate son!

 It will soon be Custodian’s 10th birthday – keep your eyes peeled for some interesting offers!