The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Wading through all the genealogy software can be difficult
This story was published Oct. 10, 1999
Will someone send a St. Bernard to rescue me? I'm lost in a blizzard of new genealogy software.
It was only a few weeks ago that Broderbund sent me a copy of Family Tree Maker 6.0 for review. This version is the deluxe set with 15 compact diskettes.
I hadn't even found time to open the box when a copy of the latest issue of Family Tree Maker Magazine arrived in the mail. The cover article is headlined: "Introducing Family Tree Maker 7.0!"
Add several apostrophes. This constitutes seven new versions of Family Tree Maker in 10 years.
I long ago gave up trying to do comprehensive reviews of genealogy software. These programs are so humongous and so complicated I would never ... Well, let's put it this way. If I can't even get them out of the box before a newer version is issued, there is no hope whatever that I could ever be current in my knowledge.
Frankly, I don't know whether I'll bother to take Family Tree Maker 6.0 out of the box because the article on 7.0 certainly grabbed my attention. One of the new features in 7.0 is its map feature. This looks like something I will prize rather highly.
Ah, but I haven't seen it yet and, unfortunately, the article in Family Tree Maker Magazine doesn't tell anything about the map feature. It just has a photograph of a computer screen with a map of the United States on it and a caption giving only the most elementary information.
Apparently, you enter events from your ancestors' lives in the program and it marks them on the map and gives details in a key at the bottom.
Sounds both interesting and valuable. But I can't evaluate a product I haven't seen, so perhaps I'll put in a call to Broderbund and ask for a review copy. But I'm warning readers and Broderbund, that column will treat only the map feature.
I despair of trying to determine what is the best genealogy software and can only offer sympathy to novices who are just getting started in genealogy.
How on earth can they determine what software to buy? There are so many good programs a person could make a hobby out of just playing with all the different applications on the market.
I will offer this advice, however. Family Tree Maker definitely is one worth considering. It's one of the better programs. I don't think any knowledgeable person would disagree.
The question of what software to buy is strongly influenced by the user's interests. A professional genealogist's needs are greater than someone who is just looking for a way to record and organize data on a couple hundred family names.
Generally speaking, there has been a great narrowing in the differences between how various software programs handle the basic things like how you enter data. A lot of the differences that most hobby or religiously motivated genealogists will notice or care about lie in the whiz bangs.
And no one is better at the whiz bangs than Family Tree Maker. Features such as the family map maker help bring genealogy alive. They also can help a researcher grasp problems and gain an overview of the family. And, let's face it, they're just entertaining.
I suppose some of the purists might turn their noses up at the entertainment value, but I think it is important and valuable.
Family Tree Maker also is good at things that don't fall in the whiz bang category, and that's where a lot of the compact discs come in. They contain indexes and, increasingly, even vital data itself.
An ever-expanding archive of indexes and data offered on CDs include birth, marriage, census, immigration and land records. CDs also contain millions of names already linked in family trees.
I don't believe I've seen a number on how many CDs Family Tree Maker sells but I can give you a clue as to the scope of this market. If you ordered every CD the company has on the market, you'd put $7,063 on your Visa or MasterCard. Well, that's at individual price. If you buy 'em all at once, Family Tree Maker will give them to you at a bargain 25 percent off, in which case the bill will come to $5,297.
That would make genealogy almost as expensive a hobby as golf.