3 ways to plant your tree online

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Oct 6, 2003 by Kevin J. Delaney The Wall Street Journal

Amateur genealogists for years have been using computer software to make family trees. Now, some of the latest programs go beyond pedigree charts to let you create multimedia albums, with digital photos and video of your clan that you can share with relatives.

It's the genealogical equivalent of the paperless office -- the idea that you can digitize birth certificates and other documents, add photos and put together a comprehensive historical record of your family on your hard drive or online.

The main genealogy software makers have made progress toward this vision since we last reviewed their programs a few years ago. But -- as with the paperless office -- there's still room for improvement.

I have been testing Family Tree Maker and a few rivals, including Personal Ancestral File by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Wholly Genes Inc.'s the Master Genealogist. Family Tree Maker is by far the No. 1 genealogy program in terms of sales -- for good reason.

Riverdeep released a new version of its program last month. The software is developed by MyFamily.com Inc. of Provo and published by Riverdeep Group PLC of Dublin, Ireland. Family Tree Maker Version 11 has a suggested retail price of $49.99 to $99.99, depending on how many genealogical databases you order.

I'm impressed by how easy it is to create family trees. But I'm disappointed that the multimedia elements aren't more tightly woven into them. And even with access to a number of online databases, it was hard to find good information.

To test the programs, I created a family tree from scratch. Then, I worked with family data my father, a genealogy buff, had entered into his computer, involving ancestors as far back as the 1600s. I spruced it up with photos and video and shared it with him online.

When you create a new file, Family Tree Maker asks you to fill in some basic details about yourself, your parents and your grandparents. It then searches its online databases for other information to fill out your family tree, grading with a star system the information it thinks is most useful. I had some technical problems with this step, but after a series of consultations with MyFamily.com's support team, it worked. In my case, the online data, most of which cost extra subscription fees, included a large amount of irrelevant records.

On the whole, Family Tree Maker is simple to use. The developers have thought through many possibilities of ethnic and religious background -- providing, for example, places to enter a relative's caste or excommunication date. One particularly well-designed function gives you letters to print out to request information from public-records bureaus, and instructions on where to send them.

You can create a Scrapbook linked to each individual's file to hold digital photos, video and other related documents. It also lets you show a picture of people alongside their entry on the family tree.

The software had problems playing a standard digital video file I inserted into my father's Scrapbook, and MyFamily.com's support team didn't resolve them. I wish the Scrapbook were more integrated with the rest of the program so you could, for example, link photos of a wedding directly to the marriage details. One nice feature does allow you to attach a picture to each information source you list.

Family Tree Maker lets you easily make Web pages, but only on MyFamily.com's online genealogy site. And you have to sign away rights to most information you upload. But you can create nice custom printout books on your family.

For those who just want to enter genealogical data somewhere, Personal Ancestral File offers a competent alternative. And it's free of charge. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints lets you download it from the Web at www.familysearch.org.

It doesn't have the same depth of features as Family Tree Maker. Rather, it focuses more on a family-tree chart and individuals' data than on broader family history. Still, it accepts photos and video much like Family Tree Maker.

What it does, it does well. The pedigree-chart view employs a clever technique for hiding an individual's data until you move the cursor over the name, making it easier to fit more people on the screen. Using a link in the program, I downloaded information about an ancestor who died in Normandy, France, in 1677.

The Master Genealogist -- from Wholly Genes, of Columbia, Md., a 10-year-old company specializing in family-history software -- says it's for use by professional genealogists in addition to amateurs. I tested version 5.0, available for download on its Web site (www.whollygenes.com). You can try it for free or pay $79 to buy it online, though the site says the version currently available lacks some functions planned for a final edition.

The Master Genealogist has some advanced features, such as the ability to catalog sources of information and to rate reliability. But I found it hard to navigate. Its multimedia functions are similar to those of the other programs.