Geneaology Software

If you're really serious about getting into genealogy then you can save yourself a lot of time and effort by using a commercial genealogy program at the start. Family Tree Maker, Brother's Keeper, Legacy Fanily Tree, etc. are all good programs.

A decent, free genealogy program is Personal Ancestry File. You can download it from here: http://www.familysearch.org/eng/paf/. One nice feature is that if you later decide you need a more powerful program, you can transfer your data from PAF to the new program faily easily.

And here's a link to some free genealogy templates and forms: http://www.1stopfreeshop.com/genealogy.htm.

Have fun.

Dave

Thankyou both for the links. My searches lead me to the same pages. Seems like LDS play a big part in online genealogy. All roads seem to lead back to 'their' links/pages.

I just started doing some genealogy a couple of weeks ago.  I'm a novice but here's what I found.  I started at www.genealogy.com .  They let you build a family tree, with some restrictions, on-line for free.  I tried that a little first; then decided it would be easier and better to have the program locally, so I bought Family Tree Maker which they push.  That's probably exactly what they want.  I guess their on-line program is a stripped-down version of Family Tree Maker.  For a small project, the on-line version might suffice, or be enough intro to see if you want to be serious enough to buy something.  If you do buy something, I would suggest as a beginner, go with the most basic version.  It looks like the premium versions mostly just include subscriptions to some of the non-free on-line databases which could be useful if you get really serious, but are not needed for recording and organizing data that you already know or can find.

For some reson I don't recall. I didn't bother looking for much freeware before I started, but I just now looked.  It looks like the LDS church has several free software downloads at http://www.ldscatalog.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10001&storeId=10001&categoryId=7000000&langId=-1&parent_category_rn=100069&level=2&bcname=Software%20Downloads%20-%20Free&top=Y&resetCat=N&replBC=subcatlist100069 .

Here's another page with several links for genealogy software, some of them free - http://www.genhomepage.com/software.html .

But I haven't tried any of these free programs so I can't offer any evaluation.

 

P.S.

I just reread davejohn's previous reply and see that he gave 2 good links for genealogy freeware that are probably more reliable than mine.  I probably should have checked those out myself before I bought my program, but I'm satisified.

Message Edited by JPA123 on 02-07-2004 02:32 PM

JPA, I personally use Family Tree Maker myself.  It fits all my needs.

Dave