Family Tree Software for a Mac
I’ve never been into genealogy, but I’ve been scouring the Apple downloads site for software updates for my new computer recently and while I was there came across a few nice looking Family Tree programs. Anna’s mum is into genealogy so I thought I would check them out.
To start with none seemed to quite fit my needs. The program that first interested me was Family, but this turned out to be a simple way of creating a graphical family tree, but with no backend database for holding the information. It works well but wasn’t what I was after. I then tried lots of others that all had good database backends but left quite a bit of room for improvement as far as the graphical output was concerned. What I really wanted was a program that allowed you to enter peoples details into a robust database back-end but would then draw ‘pretty’ family tree diagrams based on that data.
I was just about to give up on my search (I wasn’t that interested after all) when I came across Mac FamilyTree, which does seem to suite my requirements perfectly. The database side of things allows me to store more information than I will ever find out about anyone in my family. Actually I probably don’t even know that much stuff about myself! It then has numerous options of different graphical charts included a Family Chart, Descendant Chart, Genogram and even a world map of events related to the people in your database.
On top of all that there is even a ‘publish’ feature that allows you to save your family tree to CD or automatically generate a complete family tree website… Watch this space as I now have the genealogy bug and will no doubt be subjecting you all to a family tree section on this site soon.
