Whether you're researching ancestors, seeking long-lost cousins, or trying to create a readable family tree, your Mac can show you the way.
Carolyn Bickford
The moldering family bible my father's cousin keeps is packed with information -- but not enough of it for my taste. It has birthdays and death dates going back to the first Bickford to set foot on American soil, but its keepers didn't bother to track wives' names or daughters' marriages or to explain why my great-grand-uncle is labeled a "swashbuckler." On my mother's side, the information is less processed: a pile of old photographs; a birth certificate handwritten in old German script that I'm unable to read; and the stories she tells me of her birthplace, Silesia, a pocket of Europe that belongs to a different country every other generation or so. As for my husband's family, my mother-in-law kindly offered to send the pertinent information in GEDCOM format (a standard for genealogical data on the Mac and the PC). Seeking to consolidate all this information and fill in the blanks, I embarked on a tour of Mac genealogy software and the online forums frequented by other swashbuckler seekers.
Personal Ancestral File: Not Just for Mormons
To start with, I looked at the bargain-priced but limited program my mother-in-law uses: Personal Ancestral File 2.1 (Rating: Acceptable (3 of 5 mice)). She bought it for $36 from the Church of Latter Day Saints (800-537-5950), but the church has since stopped selling this version, pending the release of a newer version in January. It has fields for all the basic information (dates and places of birth, baptism, marriage, death, and burial) and for Latter Day Saints rites, such as date of sealing, but you can't redefine any of the fields for dates that are important to you, such as adoption date -- you're stuck putting such information into the notes field. Personal Ancestral File lets you create records for people whose connection to your family is uncertain (you know they're related to you, but you're not sure how), but linking them in a specific way later on is tedious. The program's graphic capabilities are also limited; you can create basic descendant charts (family trees), but you can't link scanned pictures or hard-copy records to people's electronic records. On the other hand, the program comes with a generous manual, even though it does focus on Latter Day Saints rituals more than my mother-in-law would wish.
Family Events: The Documentary Approach
For about the same price, my mother-in-law could have bought the also basic Family Events (Rating: Poor/Acceptable (2.5 of 5 mice); $35), from (M)agreeable Software (612-559-1108). Offering a method as unusual as the spelling of its company name, Family Events has you record information directly from event-related documents such as birth certificates and marriage licenses; it then creates records for family members and determines their relationships based on the event information you entered. Individual record windows have fields for a person's birth, death, father, mother, spouse, and children, and all of the windows have a scrollable field for notes. But Family Events provides for no events beyond the basics: You have records set up for birth, marriage, and death and generic record fields for all other events. As with Personal Ancestral File, you can't link scanned pictures or records to the events. And the pedigree and descendant charts, although functional, aren't particularly nice-looking. Finally, the slim manual comes in electronic format only; it's well organized for reading online, but you'll probably want to print it out eventually.
MacRoots II: Written for Researchers
Serious researchers might lean more toward the awkward but scholarly MacRoots II (Rating: Acceptable (3 of 5 mice); $89), from Itasca Softworks (218-785-2745). It's the only program that insists that you rate the quality of your source information. And as you'll find out in your research, documents will disagree. All of my mother's U.S. documents, for instance, misspell her middle name, simply because an immigration official wrote it down wrong.
It's too bad MacRoots II has such a primitive interface. It offers several windows (one showing an individual's history, one showing a nuclear family, and one showing three generations), and actions operate inconsistently within them; double-clicking prompts a "remove this person?" message in one instance and opens an additional field in another. The data fields offered for individuals are flexible but incompletely so; beyond birth date and place, you can define fields for events such as Bar Mitzvahs and ordinations but not adoptions. Since you have to use a scroll bar to move between generations in the lineage window, it's far too easy to overshoot a generation. And since notes are tied to individuals, you sometimes have to relink or reenter sources.
Still, MacRoots II, unlike Personal Ancestral File and Family Events, does let you link pictures on your computer to individuals. It also creates charts, has fields for family members' addresses, and offers a slim but well-organized manual with a good index.
Reunion: The Rolls Royce of Roots Research
Despairing of finding a genealogy program with an intuitive interface, I was pleasantly surprised by Reunion (Rating: Very Good (4 of 5 mice)), from Leister Productions (717-697-1378). At $129, it's a splurge, but it's both easy to use and capable and it produces great charts.
Its interface features well-designed displays, easy navigation, and clear choices of action. The main window shows you three generations at once: grandparents, parents, and children, with up to eight fields for events in parents' lives such as the parents' birth dates and education. To navigate between generations, you either select the Overview menu option or just double-click on the grandparents or children. Adding subsequent or previous marriages (or unmarried partners) is as easy as selecting Add Spouse from the menu bar. You can then look at a parent's other partners, by bringing up a pop-up list of their names from a heart icon above each parent's name. The fields are modifiable, so you can change, say, the christening date to the immigration date or religion to political affiliation. You can even use color codes to identify a child as, for instance, a twin, a child of unmarried parents, or adopted. And it's easy to create records for mystery relatives and then link them into the family tree once you've uncovered their relationship.
Reunion includes plenty of niceties in the areas of notes, addresses, and pictures. It has three modifiable fields for notes for each person, so you can keep track of your sources separately from anecdotes. Like MacRoots II and Personal Ancestral File, it lets you keep addresses, which you can export to a contact manager, for family members. Reunion lets you link pictures to family members and also lets you look at the linked pictures separately -- which you might want to do if you're scanning documents and linking them to the program.
Reunion also creates the most beautiful charts of any of the programs, thanks to the included SuperChart program. You can create descendant and pedigree charts for any member of your family. You can also create a wide variety of reports, from a Person report (which shows everything you've noted for one member of your family) to an Ahnentafel report (which lists family members by generation).
My favorite feature, however, was Reunion's ability to provide the correct names for various blood relationships, which comes in handy when you're trying to puzzle out whether cousin George is your second cousin or your first cousin once removed. The other programs can create descendant charts from which you can extrapolate your relationships, but if a program can do it for me, so much the better.
My few complaints about Reunion applied to most of the other programs as well. They all required me to work around facts that don't fit the traditional European-American family profile. For instance, if I wanted to add a gay uncle's partner to the family tree in Reunion, he'd have to be identified as female. And if you're doing genealogical research with Reunion rather than with MacRoots II, you have to remember to rate your sources in the notes field. But working around minor problems such as this was much more fun with Reunion than with the other programs.
Gene: Lean but Keen Shareware
If you're just getting started with genealogy and you're not sure you want to spend $149 on Reunion, you can start out with Gene (Rating: Acceptable/Very Good (3.5 of 5 mice)), a $15 shareware program available online (you can download it from ZD Net/Mac; for instructions on accessing this service, see How to Reach Us). It gives you an easy way to catalog your family and create good-looking family charts. The fields it provides for an individual are pretty basic: name, sex, birthday, birthplace, mother, father, and notes. However, Gene automatically creates cards for parents, and when you open their cards, it shows all the children you've already put into the program. It also has an address book and the ability to link an individual to a picture. And once you're ready to buy a commercial program, you can export its information in GEDCOM format.
In fact, all of these programs let you export and import their information among versions and across programs in GEDCOM format, with varying degrees of success. Expect to do some tweaking if you try this.
Online Lineage Lookups
My mother-in-law says her family tree would be much sparser if it weren't for her online research. Through the genealogy forum on America Online, she found a fellow amateur genealogist in England who is helping her piece together the European branch of her family. CompuServe, Prodigy, and eWorld also have genealogy forums, in which you can ask genealogists about their research methods and resources and maybe even find others who can assist you in filling out the missing branches of your family tree.
If you're like me, you'll also head for the World Wide Web. The Genealogy Home Page (http://ftp.cac.psu.edu/~saw/genealogy.html) has links to dozens of other genealogy-related pages and to Internet newsgroups such as soc.genealogy.misc and soc.genealogy.methods. It also has links to research resources such as the National Archives Information server, which gives you information on how to order records -- for instance, documentation of your great-great-grandfather's military service in the Civil War or immigrant and passenger arrival lists. The Yahoo Genealogical Page (http://www.yaho .com/yahoo/Science/Genealogy) has many of the same links as on the Genealogy Home Page as well as some more-obscure ones, such as the link to the Ontario Cemetery Finding Aid (http://ww .islandnet.com/ocfa/).
Asking the Right Questions
Since researching my mother's family would have required looking through Czech, German, and Polish records, it was easier to ask her about her family directly -- with the help of The Life History Disk (Rating: Very Good (4 of 5 mice)), from Starcom Microsystems (801-225-1480). It's a series of questions -- in a choice of Word, WordPerfect, MacWrite, or text format -- that elicit information about generations up to four back as well as opinions about relatives. The questions are divided up into chapters, and some of them may not be relevant -- for instance, asking my mother about junior high school when at that age she was living through World War II on the Eastern Front. But at $20 or so, the Life History Disk costs the same as -- or less than -- a similar book, and having the questions in digital format makes them easy to modify.
Mysteries of the Ages
If my ancestors had owned a Mac instead of a family Bible, maybe I'd now know why my great-grand-uncle was labeled a swashbuckler. But then maybe not, considering that I marked down one of my cousins as a "professional slacker" in her occupation field. I'll leave that for the next generation to figure out.
