Genealogy Software

By Stacy on March 31st, 2010

It is time for me to get serious about learning who my ancestors were.  As I mentioned previously, I have too many names, dates, URLs, records, etc for me to continue with handwritten notes.  I need to get organized.  In that previous post, I talked about how I’m organizing URLs, scans and documents.  That is very important.  But I also have a lot of family trees and I want to link evidence back into the family trees.  How can I do this?  With a genealogy program.

I wasn’t sure which one to use, so I did a lot of research.  I looked at a variety of software review sites and read various blog and messageboard posts about what sorts of things people find helpful in genealogy software.  I thought about what I would find useful and I came up with a list of things that I wanted.  Read on to see my desired features and what programs I thought would be best.  What is your favorite genealogy program?

  • Mapping – my ancestors came from all over Europe, and once they moved to the US, they moved all over the country.  I want to see where theses places were, and I want to maybe even see arrows or lines indicating their migration.
  • Multimedia – I’m lucky enough to have photographs of many of my ancestors.  I want to be able to link their photos directly in the genealogy software.  I thought this also might be helpful if I can get scans of documents or oral interviews from grandparents and other relatives.
  • Biography – I want some way to be able to write biographies of ancestors that I know enough about.  This could be a free form field without a character limit or the ability to link Word docs to an ancestor.
  • Timelines – I’m a history geek, so it would be great to see a timeline that compares events in ancestors’ lives with important historical events.
  • Charts – I want to view pedigree charts starting with me and doubling at every generation, and I want to show descendant charts – start with one ancestor and show all the people descended from that one person.
  • Research Oriented - I want the software to support citations and to allow conflicting information so that I can sort through it myself.
  • Stats – I want to know all sorts of stats.  Stats are fun!  What is the most common childbearing age?  Oldest person?
  • Help Me Grow as a Genealogist – I want the software to support a to-do list that I enter.  I want it to inform me if it finds an error, such as someone being born after the death of their mother.  I want it to be able to suggest a certain area of research.

It is a big list, and this isn’t even the full list!  I know that it would be almost impossible to find software that did every single thing I wanted it to.  I knew that I would get the best one I could and then either find other add-ons or utilities to do the other stuff, or I would just live without it.

After coming up with the list of features, I visited a bunch of review sites to see what neutral third parties thought.  These are the review sites I looked at:

After reading all the reviews, I came up with 4 programs that I thought came the closest to what I want.  I reviewed screenshots, watched videos, and reviewed the list of features on their site.  I still haven’t decided yet, though.  What is your favorite?

Categorized under: Getting Organized.
Tagged with: .

One Response to “Genealogy Software”

  1. Dave Proper says:
    April 16, 2010 at 4:43 am

    Hi Stacy,
    I followed this link from your post on the SGGEE list server. My two cents for genealogy software is that The
    Master Genealogist is the best program there is. I started down this genealogy rabbit hole 18 years ago using Family Tree Maker. It worked but I soon started to become frustrated by it’s limitations. Like you, I trilled the Web seeking various opinions and reviews and in the end TMG one out. TMG allows you the greatest control over your data but it also has the steepest learning curve. It took me quite a while to clean up all of my earlier mess. Perhaps the worst of it was not carefully listing my sources and organizing the piles of documents. You work on one particular family line for a while and then move on…some time later you come back to that original line and then you wonder “how did I find that and how sure am I of it?”.
    My wife’s father’s side are Germans from Russia too. They settled in the Western end of the U.P. We haven’t been back there a number of years but my wife’s sister and brother each own part of the old family homestead and spend most of their summers there. If you would like any further details on TMG please let me know.
    Dave
    dproper@charter.net