Family Tree Software

My Maternal Grandmother - Emily Smith

One thing that has been on my do-to list for ages is to investigate different Family Tree software packages. For ages and ages, I have used Brother's Keeper. This was a free download, although you can get additional features if you pay for the registration key. I have only been able to find one supplier in the UK who sells this key but I have repeatedly hesitated to buy it as I'm not entirely happy with Brother's Keeper.

It is OK .... up to a point ...... but it has a very old-fashioned feel to it and it's a bit 'clunky' to navigate round. Also, the reports it produces aren't particularly nice in their layout. I also don't think it enables you to easily make use of Census information. It would also be nice to easily produce PDFs from the data to share with other people and having a way to automatically produce web pages might be a nice feature.

My Maternal Grandfather - Frederick Brett

Although I subscribe to The Family Tree magazine, I can't recall seeing any comparison reviews of different software in there and, in any  case, on the free CD that comes with the magazine, they always give a copy of RootsMagic 5 Essentials, so seem to be biased towards them I guess.

Nevertheless, some considerable time ago, I found a website that has a high-level comparison of different software and I thought this would be a good start.

For many of these, you can download a free version that enables you to try it out, so this is what I think I will do!! Luckily, a have some pretty good 'live test data' in my own Family Tree in that both my Maternal Grandmother and John's Paternal Grandfather married more than once as an example of 'slightly challenging' data to take account off.

Well .... better get started! Let's see how I get on!!