On test: Genealogy software

If you're looking to climb your family tree, genealogy software can be valuable both for research and presentation. Join us as we look at six popular products

Have you ever found yourself wondering whether you are related to a famous person, or what your ancestors got up to? Discovering your family's past can be fascinating and is a very popular hobby.

In finding out about your distant relatives, you can quickly build up a huge mass of information. But without some form of organisation, you can easily become bogged down or miss something important. Genealogy software helps you keep your notes and findings in order, leaving you to get on with the more exciting business of research and discovery.

That's not the end of the story, though. The genealogy software that we are looking at here can do far more than just cross-reference your family and record dates. Even the most fascinating histories can have new life breathed into them by the multimedia capability of genealogy software.

You can use it to organise photos and video of family members, and even sound files if you have old recordings that you can transfer to your computer.

So why settle for dry facts and figures? Let genealogy software help you build a sense of your family's history.

Getting started
The internet has become an indispensable resource with a huge number of historical and official documents available in electronic format.

Entire public records offices are at your disposal on the web, as well as online catalogues that tell you where to find the originals.

You can find plenty more media to add into your project than the contents of your own photo album. Websites like British Pathé have huge repositories of videos of events in history for sale at reasonable prices that you can use to give your multimedia projects context, especially if your forebears actually witnessed the event first hand.

You don't have to think big from the start, though. Genealogy software creates a database for your family information with all the awkward work already done and with forms to make entering the information as easy as possible.

Links with other family members are created automatically, along with other relevant information such as wedding and funeral dates and locations.

Legacy Family Tree Deluxe 4 £30
www.mindscape.co.uk
Legacy is easy for beginners to pick up but has plenty to offer when you scratch below the surface. A series of introductory videos is included on the disc to explain how to enter information. They last about 50 minutes but are well worth the time.

The emphasis is on adding relations rather than individuals, so you start with yourself and build the family tree up and down. This makes it harder to leave gaps in the information. For example, adding a spouse automatically takes you to the marriage information screen, where you can add further details.

Most of the reports are fairly dry, although you can include pictures in the Family Tree report and choose the background image or create name tags for family reunions. Serious researchers will appreciate the blank charts for collecting information.

A lot of modern day genealogy focuses on research using the internet but this isn't suitable for everyone. Some people simply don't want an internet connection, so Legacy has included CDs containing all the information to be found on two websites: Ancestry.com and MyTrees.com, both US-based sites but with a host of UK census information on each.

Legacy will help you create a website based on the information you have entered, although you'll have to arrange your own space on the internet with your ISP or a web-hosting company.

This is really handy if you want to share the results of your research with relatives that live far away or overseas. The web page can include pictures and there are four different ways of organising the information for others to view.

It's strengths are its ease of use and organisation but it could do with more multimedia capabilities.

Legacy Family Tree Foundations £10
www.mindscape.co.uk
For those wanting to start out without forking out more than a tenner, Legacy Family Tree Foundations offers the same capabilities as the Deluxe edition but without the research CDs. The same training video is included so beginners are not left to flounder.

You can search for individuals on the internet without closing the application, which is excellent for quickly checking records without having to remember a lot of website addresses. Legacy also includes the ability to use records from the Church of the Latter Day Saints but this can be turned off if you don't expect it to give any results. Some records relating to the UK are kept so it might be worth a try.

The date calculator is very useful for working out ages from dates or vice versa and the relationship calculator tells you the precise nature of your relationship with all those distant relatives. The reporting capabilities are no less comprehensive than the Deluxe version and you can create many different versions of family trees to tailor to your preferences.

If you are happy to do without the databases supplied on CD with the deluxe version and are prepared to do most of your research online, Legacy Family Tree Foundations is an excellent buy for beginners at just a third of the price of its bigger brother and offers the best value for money in our test.

Roots Magic £35
www.rootsmagic.com
Roots Magic combines easy data entry with a very wide selection of reports and projects. It crams large amounts of information on the screen without ever losing its clarity.

Multimedia handling is very impressive. You can add pictures, audio and video files to an individual's record, each with a caption and description. It is possible to attach any kind of file, which is very useful if you have a Word document that you want to attach.

The only small disadvantage is that the program used to create the file would be needed if you wanted to open your family tree elsewhere.

Roots Magic offers the most comprehensive printing options in the group test. It can create a book for you to print out, complete with index, with different chapters made up of the reports generated by Roots Magic.

The UK retailer S&N Genealogy Supplies offers a special UK edition of Roots Magic which comes with a searchable index of census results, a UK spell-check dictionary and a copy of Bartholomew's UK Atlas 1898, which has maps and statistics for England in the 19th century.

You can download a demo of Roots Magic from www.rootsmagic.co.uk to get a feel for the software. More experienced family historians will find Roots Magic's media-handling abilities impressive.

GSP Family Tree £50
www.gsp.cc
GSP Family Tree Genealogy Suite includes a total of seven CDs covering just about anything you'd want to do while putting a family tree together. The UKinfo 2003 Lite disc alone contains 44 million names and addresses in the UK, which will be really useful for tracking down living relatives you have lost touch with.

There is also plenty of help for newcomers to genealogy, such as a book that covers the basics of gathering and recording information, while one of the discs contains links to websites with information about their services and any costs.

Entering information is easy but some must be entered into separate windows, which are opened from the main window. This keeps the main window simple but can slow down data entry.

Family Tree will accept picture and sound files but unfortunately you can't add video. Pictures are added to individuals but the photo album view enables you to collate them with your own captions.

The family tree views can place the chosen individual either at the top, bottom or middle of the tree. Family Tree will automatically span over as many pieces of paper as are required when you come to print your report.

You can also create pages for a website showing the family tree, with a list to jump direct to individuals and detailed pages of dates and any notes on that person.

Also included are Paint Shop Pro 4 and GSP Photo Album for editing and organising images you have collected in research, along with a disc containing clip art, which can't be used directly in Family Tree but might be helpful for creative projects.

Family Tree is good value for the volume of material included but the creative projects are more limited than other offerings here.

The Times Family Tree £10
www.gsp.cc
The Times Family Tree is based on the same software as GSP's Family Tree Genealogy Suite but is an earlier version - and it shows. The home screen gives options to view an individual's family tree organised by descendants or ascendants and includes the family album, but actually adding someone to your family tree is rather tricky, which is not the best start.

All help is in electronic format with no paper manuals, so newcomers will struggle. Multimedia support is rather limited with support for only specific types of pictures and audio. The software also struggles to open files that have long file names and, alone in this test, the program crashed more than once during our group test.

You will also need to scan pictures in separately. The photo album will display all the images saved with captions and descriptions.

The Times Family Tree is limited to the photo album and the family tree views, without the ability to create web pages. If you want these extra functions you will need to spend a bit more.

The Times Family Tree is too limited for experienced genealogists and confusing for beginners. It may be cheap but we don't think you get much for your money.

Calico Pie Family Historian £50
www.family-historian.co.uk
Family Historian has some of the best data entry and media handling capabilities here. Creating records of family members is very easy. The properties window allows you to add photos and specify a close-up from a group photo. Audio and video can also be added. Any kind of file can be added to your project but remember that you will need its software to read it.

As adding the data is so simple, you can spend more time on research and creating reports about your findings. There are plenty of useful report templates and they include sample pictures of individuals and families.

The reports are great for presenting your findings to other people but you will find useful reports for your own reference in the Query Window. Queries can be used to list the relationships between individuals or to list all the birthdays recorded.

Family trees can be created for ancestors, descendants or all relatives of an individual. The options for these trees are very comprehensive and include the number of generations to show in each report and whether to display pictures.

Family Historian is ideal for those that have most of their information already gathered, but the ease of use comes at a price.

BRINGING HISTORY TO LIFE

www.britishpathe.com
British Pathé is an ambitious collection of the entire archive from 1896 to 1970. You can download free low-resolution previews of movies but better quality images or video cost £29.37. All of the clips are very well organised so it is possible to search by themes as well as dates.

www.uk.olivesoftware.com
This is the address of the British Library's archive of newspapers and periodicals that you can search for free and download as PDF files.

www.oldbaileyonline.org
If any of your ancestors fell foul of the law, you can search for records of the court proceedings and even download scans of the original records.

www.genuki.org.uk
Another website with huge amounts of information available, including links to old maps you can search by current postcodes. Other resources include collections of photographs and there are also newsgroups where you can ask others for help.

GENEALOGY WEBSITES

www.sog.org.uk
The Society of Genealogists has a free library you can search, as well as plenty of advice.

www.familyrecords.gov.uk
This government-backed website is a great place for beginners to avoid red tape when looking for records.

www.freebmd.org.uk
A volunteer-run website with records of births, marriages and deaths.

www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk
A pay-per-view website for Scottish records.

www.irishorigins.com
Free searches for information on Irish relations. There are charges for viewing detailed results.

www.ancestry.com
A huge collection of genealogical records on the web, but registration and payment is required for most records.

www.cyndislist.com
A portal with thousands of links to genealogical websites.

www.familysearch.org
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is an enthusiastic gatherer of genealogy information.

www.1837online.com
Similar to freebmd, 1837online.com is a paid for site with records from 1837 to 2002.

www.everygeneration.co.uk
This is a great site for anyone looking for relatives in black communities.