RootsMagic Family Tree Genealogy Software
Awarded "Editor's Choice" by Heritage Quest Magazine. RootsMagic is an easy to use family tree program with extensive family history reports, multiple navigation views, photos, publishing, and website creation features. RootsMagic supports unlimited people, families, events, notes, and photos. Users can print complete books (where the program writes the sentences for each event), spectacular charts, forms, lists, and even create custom reports. RootsMagic program also provides multiple database support (with drag and drop), SourceWizard, todo lists, powerful merge features, and more. Full GEDCOM support allows users to easily share their data with others, or to easily import their data from other programs. From the makers of Family Origins.
RootsMagic Family Tree Genealogy Software Accessories
 Personal Historian Software
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Genealogy, 2nd Edition
Genealogy Online For Dummies (For Dummies (Sports & Hobbies))
Quicksheet Citing Online Historical Resources
Family Atlas Genealogy Mapping Software
Getting the Most Out of RootsMagic, Third Edition
The Official Guide to Ancestry.com
Ancestry's Red Book: American State, County & Town Sources, Third Revised Edition
The Family Tree Problem Solver: Proven Methods for Scaling the Inevitable Brick Wall
Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 [OLD VERSION]
RootsMagic Family Tree Genealogy Software Reviews
Caught by Roots Magic, but another good reason to abandon Family Tree Maker which has tied itself to unacceptible, unwanted, uneeded, Internet connections. Was able to load large pre-existing genealogy file. It will take some hand editing to fix that. Some trouble between GEDCOM file codes used by Family Tree Maker, but not recognized by Roots Magic. Seems to work fine. Quick delivery of the CD directly from the source company.
I've had this software for quite a while now and find it to be the best genealogy program that I have used. I abandoned Family Tree Maker in favor of trying this product. It's a meat and potatoes program that you will not regret trying.
It is a great product for the price.just don't count on having tech support. Overall, I am very happy with the product, however, if you need to call the tech help for this product good luck. I was advised to purchase this program by a seasoned genealogist. It can sort a large number of people to unique data bases.
He was impatient when I asked him to guide me through my problem step by step. It has a multitude of features, some of which I have not had experience with as of yet. They expect everyone to be IT savy. I do not have a computer background and their help screens often don't clarify how to solve a problem that I am having.
The support is surely, grumpy, and rude.
Like any new program it takes a little getting used to, but I find myself able to move easily among individuals and families. I realize that children did not always appear on a census with parents (I have a lot of cases where teenage boys worked on other farms), but a dialogue that would let you choose other members of the family to add to a census would reduce input errors and time. On someone's recommendation, I decided to check out RootsMagic. Backup is simple; it archives a ZIP file of your day's work onto any external media you choose.
I had kept up with Family Tree Maker, and they came out with a new version. I loved this program, even though it could be quite klunky in many ways and the charting software that came with the program was always cumbersome and often crashed. After downloading the trial version, I was hooked almost immediately. I decided to try to salvage what was left of my old family tree (over 2500 individuals and cannibalized source material that dropped half the information, cry). It has built-in to-dos, so as you're entering family members and need to remember to do something, you can input a to-do related to that individual or family.
Then, some years ago, I switched to Heritage Family Tree. The death knell came with Vista, and HFTD wouldn't even boot up under Vista. It's simple, streamlined, and has fantastic source handling. It had other good built in features that I really liked.
And you can't beat the price. This is handy in cases where you have more than one person with the same name and no middle initials to distinguish them. One feature I really like is the ability to add a married couple in a census together as "Census (family)". I was never happy with FTM's management of sources it seemed to be much more interested in how to make things "pretty" and sources, the heart and soul of real genealogy, always got short shrift. I have been doing genealogy for over 15 years, and started out with very rudimentary versions of Family Tree Maker. The program is simple, straightforward, great for the historian.
However, there is a handy "Memorize" function for sources, so it's easy to paste the same source into multiple entries. It's the next best thing. When you enter a source, you're given the option to choose Source Wizard; normally I hate wizards, but this one gives a nice interface for inputting different types of sources (census, death/birth/marriage certificates, books, interviews, etc) in such a way that they are uniform and formatted for footnotes. The Search feature is particularly nice because it includes not only the name of the individual, but also the birth and death dates so you can see which one you are selecting before you do so. It's not as cute and sexy as some other, more bloated genealogy programs, but it does everything a serious genealogical researcher needs it to do and a little more besides.
Instead of overwriting the whole file every time, it only overwrites an existing file if you've changed it on the same day. This eliminates the need to enter identical census information on two people in a family. However, its source handling was the best out there, able to format and sort sources in such a way that source information could be entered completely and formatted well. This feature includes prioritization, date opened, date last worked on, date closed, and a place to add notes. Otherwise, it saves them incrementally, so you have the version you worked on last week archived as well as the one you are working on this way.
However, this version (FTM 2008) is absolutely awful; the interface is about as far a departure from logical data entry, it doesn't do a lot of basic charts, and it is just so terribly bloated with crap I will never use that I knew I had to find an alternative. And then it turned out that their GEDCOM exporter dropped a LOT of information out of the source material I'd so painstakingly entered. This way, if something disastrous happens, like you discover that the 200 relatives you spent the last week painstakingly putting in are actually not related to you at all, or you accidentally replace all instances of "Gary, Lake, Indiana" with "Inverness, Citrus, Florida", you can roll back to a version without the mistakes. However, they stopped supporting it, and although it was supposed to work with Windows XP, I experienced so many crashes with XP that I knew I had to start finding an alternative. I do wish they would extend this to the ability to select multiple members of a family, so you could enter both parents and children with one click.
I have used an earlier version of this software and this revision is an improvement both in detail entry and ease of use. With its GEDCOM compatibility, this program is sufficient for the average person to trace ancestral lineage and record details including photographs and relevant documentation. It's capability to track details encourages users to obtain information from elders before they pass on, including who is who in the box of old photographs commonly found in homes.
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