Genealogy Software for creating Family Trees

As you discover more about your family history you will find yourself gathering more and more pieces of information.

It will help immensely if you save this data in an organised way from an early point in your research. Although this can be done in the traditional way using notebooks, files and card indexes, computers can really help you not only to store information but also to view and print out that information in many different ways without retyping it. This also makes it easy to share your findings with others. If your chosen genealogy software stores its information in a common format you will also be able to quickly import and add data from many sources.

Family trees will alter as your research progresses so genealogy software products that can re-draw them with the click of a mouse hold a huge advantage over traditional methods.

There are many specially designed genealogy software products which will not only store pieces of information about individuals but can also track their relationships to one another. They also give you many different tools for presenting your information - from kinship reports and ancestry and descendant charts to web pages in some products. All have different benefits and an uderstanding of the different features will help you to decide which family tree software to buy.

Genealogy Software can be purchased at the Family Forest Genealogy Shop

Common features of Family Tree and Genealogy Software

Individual View: This view allows you to view details of each individual on your famiy tree.

Family View: This view option shows an entire family - parents and children. Most packages will display names, birth dates, death dates, marriage dates, education, baptism dates, occupations and more.

Pedigree View: This view usually gives you a four-generation direct line pedigree chart for an individual.

Ancestor Charts: Similar to a pedigree view but shows more generations for an individual's direct-line ancestors, you can usually control how much information is included.

Kinship Report: Lists the relationship of a a selected individual to every person on the tree.

Relationship calculator: Quickly displays the relationship of one person to another on your family tree, even if it is half 4th cousin 3 times removed!

Genealogy Report: A detailed listing of family information that is presented in a narrative format like a book. Included are the basic facts about each family member and will sometimes include biographical information.

Descendant Charts: This view displays an individual on your family tree with all his or her descendants.

AlternateFacts: Depending on the source, you may find conflicting information regarding the same event or fact, e.g., about the date, location, or some other detail. You can record and display conflicting information as alternate facts until you can confirm which is correct by later research. Very useful when building your family tree!

Gedcom: This is a file format that is primarily used for exchanging data between different genealogy databases and programs. There are many utilities which can create or operate on GEDCOM files.

The most popular products are:

Family Tree Maker (We use this!)
Personal Ancestral File
RootsMagic
Family Historian
Legacy Family Tree
Genbox Family History
Ancestral Quest
Brother's Keeper

A lot of Free Genealogy Software is available on the internet, or available on the cover disc of Family History magazines.

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