What is the best genealogy software available and why?
I am trying to research my family’s ancestry and I am using the Mormon software, but it isn’t very indepth.
I am already using Family Search. I would like to find out what the best software is regardless of price.
Family Tree Maker ($39) is the market leader in the USA for PC’s. Reunion is the only program I know of in the USA for the Mac. I use Roots Magic ($29) in the USA on a PC because I work as a data base designer and I know quality work when I see it.
RM is easy to use but does good things which FTM doesn’t do. Exactly what it does will sound like “geek” to you; denormalization, for instance. They use a descriptor table and ID for the location, too.
If, for instance, you have “Modesto, Stanislus, California” as the place for 400 facts in your data base, then you find out the county is spelled “Stanislaus”, you can change it just ones and it will be correct in all 400 facts.
I agree partly with Wendy – tools should be secondary. But tools help. RM will let me select people. For instance, if I find a great data base of Pennsylvania Weddings 1752 – 1900, I could have RM show me everyone in my data base who had “Pennsylvania” in any fact type – birth, death, census, marriage – so I could check to see if they were in the marriage data base. I could limit the list to those born after 1740 and before 1900. I could have them “served up” to me in three ways:
1) Selected in the individual view
2) Printed on paper
3) “Printed” to a text file, which I could import into Excel
If you search Google for [genealogy software review] or [genealogy software comparison] you will get thousands of biased and unbiased opinions.
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