About creating online family trees: genealogy software can be a tremendous help in keeping your work organized.
Why use stand-alone software? It’s probably the most flexible method of organizing your many hours of hard work, and displaying your family tree in a variety of forms.
It also gives you the most privacy, since the software will only reside on your computer.
A number of people don’t trust putting their ancestors online, for several reasons.
Of course, you can share it with those you wish, and it’s a good idea to collaborate with other family members.
No matter what happens with your online trees, you will always have software on your computer, that no one can change or delete.
Software allows you to enter a lot of information about a person, including detailed notes, and displays people and their information in a way that makes sense to you.
It allows you to quickly create groups of people, such as everyone who lived in New York City from 1912-1918; people born between 1851-1860 in Poland; anyone who immigrated through Boston — or anyone who was never married and died before the age of 67.
It allows you to attach documents, photos, video and audio to people or families.
Good programs let you to generate a variety of tree layouts, charts, tables, reports and lists. And you look like a serious genealogist!
Good software allows and encourages you to document your sources (a critical part of genealogy) in as much or little detail as you like.
Some software also allows you to enter and convert Hebrew dates that you will often find on older gravestones.
You can create as many trees as you like with genealogy software and later combine them. You generally can’t do that with online trees, although global online trees are already in that form.
There are dozens of different programs out there, ranging from free to about $100. Of course, the more you pay, the more features and support you generally get.
I encourage you to check out the many choices on Cyndi’s List: www.cyndislist.com/software.
Her list also includes software reviews.
The most popular programs that run on either PC or Mac platforms are Family Tree Maker (FTM) and RootsMagic.
Other programs include Legacy software (only runs on PCs), and Reunion (only runs on Macs.)
A number of paid programs offer a free demo trial, so you can try it out on a limited basis before buying. RootsMagic and Reunion are two such programs — disappointingly, FTM doesn’t have a demo trial.
You don’t have to limit yourself to just one format — you can use all three. Many genealogists use both online trees and genealogy software.
My genealogy software (Reunion) is my go-to way of organizing ancestors and relatives.
I’ve exported GEDCOMs from Reunion to create online trees on Ancestry, MyHeritage and Wikitree.
Although FamilySearch won’t accept GEDCOMs, I’ve put many of my ancestors on its Family Tree also.
The challenge is keeping all those trees up to date. If you change someone’s birthdate, you need to change them in all the trees.
That’s where synchronizing them with software comes in quite handy. Part of Family Tree Maker and RootsMagic’s popularity are because both allow you to synchronize the family tree(s) on your computer, with online trees at Ancestry.
RootsMagic additionally allows synching with FamilySearch and MyHeritage.
Many of the major or long-time programs have their own online support forum from users or they have Facebook pages.
Of course, there’s much more to genealogy than creating a family tree. Documenting how (and why, with sources) your ancestors and relatives are related to you is important. That’s perhaps even a more important function of online trees and genealogy software.
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