Can anyone recommend good family tree software?

Question

I am new to family history research. Can anyone recommend a good software program for building a family tree?

Answer 1

I like Roots Magic a lot. I was a computer programmer for 30 years and I can tell good data base design when I see it. It is easy to use, too.

Family Tree Maker is the market leader in the USA. We RM fans say that is because it has a bigger advertising budget.

PAF is free, from the Mormons.

You can Google "Genealogy Software Comparison" and get side-by-side comparisons by professional software critics. There are such, just like there are movie, book and restaurant critics.

My sample is limited. I tried RM back when it was FOW 6, FTM 6 and PAF 2 at the same time in 1996 or so. I liked FOW/RM so much I gave away the other two and have used it ever since.

Answer 2

Check out kincafe.com. It is still in the beta but it is an online family tree making site. I like allows my cousins and I to work together in building our family tree on their site.

They have a cool way of building a family tree allowing to put pictures under each name.

Answer 3

You cannot say one program is better than another . You will find most have  plus and minus points and only personal experience will sort that out . It also depends  really in which country you are in  and are researching . For many FamiltyTree Maker is good for  charts and trees but weak on narratives . Roots Magic  is a cracker ! In fact I use BOTH progs when drafting out my final product . An excellant  program based on gedcoms is Family Historian which is a UK based program  and good but somewhat difficult at times to fathom !

Answer 4

I have worked only with pen & paper, and with Family Tree Maker (could've been an ad that got this started, but when I began doing research I asked the "genealogy experts" on my mother's side of the family and on my father's side what they used and it was FTM on both counts, so decided to go with the flow).

FTM works very well with Ancestry.com, which has been a huge plus for me.

It also enables you to attach documents, notes, census records, birth/death certificate IDs, photos, etc. to each person and each married couple in your tree, which makes the descendant trees and ancestor trees much more interesting.  You can have personal scrapbooks and marriage scrapbooks for everyone in your tree as well (meaning as many photos, documents, etc. can be included in those scrapbooks as you want).

The only trouble I've had was that when I was ready to publish a book for one branch of my Mom's family, there were over 1500 people in it, and the off-the-shelf "publish a book" feature of FTM would time out on me.  I also found it inflexible, meaning I wasn't able to tweak it as I wanted to.  Both those problems still exist today.

I overcame that using Adobe Acrobat Pro software (which was $99 with a student discount) together with the built-in reports and scrapbooks and trees in FTM, to create an 810-page hardcover book a couple years ago.

If you're the first in your family to ever do this, you can take your pick and not worry about incorporating any existing files.  Overall, I've been extremely pleased with FTM.