The Best Genealogy Apps
Every family seems to have at least one hobbyist historian, someone who is dead set on finding the documents that prove your heritage, maps that show your purported homeland, and missing dates from tombstones. Don’t we all have that one aunt or great-grandfather or cousin who just loves to show off the dusty leather-bound book listing all the births, marriages, and deaths that tell the story of your family’s collective past? A few very good genealogy software packages and services make it easy for you join in your obsessive relative’s quest to trace your roots, whether you’re a beginner or an experienced hobbyist.
If you’ve ever had a budding interest in family research and record-keeping, but didn’t know where to start, these software applications?all of which are reasonably priced?can help you get going. The very best not only gives you access to the research databases but also guide you on how to use them. Within a few hours, you can cobble together several generations’ worth of information, which you can build on over a few days to create a chart or other keepsake for family members, or over a lifetime if you decide to commit to the hobby. A genealogist’s work is never done.
These packages all cater to different users. Some are great for beginners, while others are designed for the truly dedicated. Some encourage you to share what you find and learn via the Internet and to connect with other people online who are searching for their roots. Other programs leave all their default settings switched to “private.”
Explore your past, map your roots, and patch together that family tree with one of these apps for tracing your ancestry.
FEATURED IN THIS ROUNDUP:
Ancestral Quest
$29.95
Genealogy enthusiasts can do some serious work with Ancestral Quest, a straightforward and no-nonsense program for recording family history. Casual family historians may find it intimidating, though. Ancestral Quest is one of the most precise tools on the market for mapping a family tree, and the downloadable app is very cost-effective. The program is highly solutions-oriented, and is perfectly designed for those who want to accurately record what they know and how they know it about their family. Ancestral Quest does provide a lot of links to additional information, should you choose to use them, with partners such as Roots Web Project and FamilySearch.org. Most important of all, Ancestral Quest is thorough and deep. There are even special tools for dealing with different surname patterns (when the father’s surname isn’t what carries through lineage), sections devoted to Jewish history, and a lot of synchronicity with genealogy maintained by the Latter Day Saints.
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Ancestry.com (2012)
Free to $34.95 per month
Ancestry.com lets anyone build a family tree for free, and with a paid subscription, makes an incredible number of resources easily accessible. With a free online account, you can create family trees, but you can’t search the archives that Ancestry.com makes available, and these are what make the service so valuable. These archives include census data, obituary indexes, military records, immigration documents?thousands of registries from different states, provinces, counties, and countries. It costs $12.95 per month for a six-month membership for U.S.-only data, and up to $34.95 per month if you want international information included, too. The program goes to great lengths to make it easy for novices to pick up genealogy as a hobby and focuses on exploration (which can sometimes lead you astray) and sharing. It’s simple and straightforward to use, but beware of exploring too far off the path, as Ancestry.com’s “hints” aren’t always valid.
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Family Tree Maker (2012)
$39.99 for Windows version; Family Tree Maker for Macs 2 $69.99)
Our Editors’ Choice for family history software is Family Tree Maker because it leverages all the great online research tools of its online companion service, Ancestry.com, while also letting anyone build beautiful family trees using installed software. Family Tree Maker is essentially the standalone version of Ancestry.com (free to $44.95 per month, 4 stars), and it integrates tightly with the site. It has everything you need to trace your roots and record the stories of your ancestors. You can upload photos, voice recordings, text notes, and videos and attach them as records to a person the same way you would with more archival documents. You can even explore maps where family events took place. Family Tree Maker goes to great lengths to make it easy for novices to dabble in genealogy and share what they uncover, as well as explore the histories of other families online.
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Legacy Family Tree Deluxe 7.5
From $29.95
The feature-rich genealogy software Legacy Family Tree Deluxe 7.5 has all the tools you’ll need to record your personal history, particularly if you’re a more experienced family historian looking for a new tool. The downloadable (or shrink-wrapped and shipped) software for Windows can easily keep you busy recording numerous details of the people closest to you. It also has some thorough suggestions of sources to investigate for possible records related to each person in your tree, as well as a checkbox for ticking off the research you’ve completed or marking research “to-do.” While it has a wealth of tools and features, the user experience can be choppy, particularly if you’re new to genealogy as a hobby. It doesn’t offer the same guidance as some of the other products, but it does have some interesting features. Legacy Family Tree Deluxe is a fine option if you’re reasonably well versed in genealogy as a practice already.
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