Rootsmagic UK Platinum 4

The latest version of Rootsmagic remains in many ways an old-fashioned genealogy program that still shows its roots as a database (the video tutorial even calls it that rather than a family tree) but it does try to incorporate the world of family history available online.

The program offers plenty of ways to enter, view and amend information but has yet to smoothly combine those database functions with information gathered from the web.

There is no equivalent to Family Tree Maker’s feature that can compare manual entries with information stored on Ancestry UK and then merge them into a single record.

Rootsmagic offers something similar courtesy of the Family Search service but this has been revamped by its owners - the Mormon church – and it doesn’t work anymore. The program also includes a free 90-day subscription to The Genealogist website.

What you get in the box looks impressive, though. There are seven CDs’ worth of stuff including landowner records from the 1870s (sometimes called the Victorian Domesday Book), Bartholomew’s 1898 atlas of England and Wales, Burke’s Encyclopedia of Heraldry and the Phillimore and Fry Index to Changes of Name, 1760-1901.

These are essentially PDFs of the originals which have been digitally enhanced and indexed. While it’s great to see them included, if you want to use them you will have to grapple with the archaic original text and work out how to convert them from PDF format to Rootsmagic.

Once the information is there, the program offers plenty of ways to organise, edit and present it, even if these features labour under a tired and dated interface.

We especially like the Add a Fact feature which lets users include milestones in a person’s life, such as baptism, graduation and first communion, as you come across them. Users can also add their own fact types to the list.

The search features are sophisticated enough to cope with the large amounts of data that can be accumulated into a complex family tree and there are plenty of presentation options, including family ‘books’ and the ability to export a tree as a simple website.

Rootsmagic 4 has strong database features and a good collection of extra material but it’s let down by an old-fashioned interface and rickety integration with online source material.