Family Tree Project – Mac Family Tree Software Review
I’ve been meaning to work on a family tree for ages and did make a start a few years ago using software called MacFamily Tree. It has recently had an update to a new version which prompted me to have another look at our family tree.
Adding Data
The software is excellent with loads of really good features. Adding data is straight forward enough. You can add all of the usual important data on a person such as their names, dates of birth, parents, partners, children etc. Not only is it easy to add the information but it is presented in a nice easy to read format. You can even import people from your Mac Address Book application if you wish.
As well as the important data about individuals you can also add events to each person. Not just birth deaths and marriages but occupations, graduation, illnesses and a whole host of other event types – Even circumcision if you really want to! You can add facts about people, such as physical characteristics, possessions, e-mail addresses and more, add as many notes as you want and also add media such as photos. These can of course be added direct from iPhoto. Each record can be labelled and you can include ‘sources’ so that you know where various bits of data came from enabling you to check their reliability.
Viewing Family Trees
This is where the fun really begins with a huge array of different ways to view your family tree. Even in the basic edit mode you can see a ‘person context’ chart which shows a basic family tree. Click on the View options though and you get a whole list of ways to visualise your family tree.
Basic Family Tree
Genogram
Fan Chart
There are ancestor charts, descendant charts, timelines, statistics, fan charts, genogram and more and best of all is an interactive 3D ‘Virtual Tree’ that you can zoom in and out of, rotate and view from different angles and simply hover over individuals to get information on them. Click on them and they become the centre of the tree.
Statistics
Looking at the Statistics is fun too but really comes into its own when you have lots of data from lots of people in your family tree. You can choose statistics on a wide range of things, such as peoples ages, parents age at child birth, children per family and much much more.
Reports
In addition to the general viewing of the family tree and the statistics MacFamily Tree allows you to generate and save reports. Many of these are very useful and some are fun to look at as well.
Exporting and sharing
One of the best things about MacFamily Tree is that it is easy to create a very usable website from within its export feature. As a web designer I’d liked it if the website that it created was a little more modular so that I could edit it and tweak it to my liking a little easier but the basic template is fine and you can even store it on the MacFamily Tree server if you wish allowing you to publish your family tree for free.
I’m going to use this feature to send the family tree to people in our family and ask them to provide me with additional / missing information. If I send it to everyone in the current family tree then no doubt I’ll be inundated with new information and our family tree will really start to grow.
Conclusion
There are many more features to explore such as integration with Google Earth, GED.com and much much more. So if you’re looking for a Family Tree / Geneaology software for your Mac then this is the place to start. I can’t imagine anything beating much better than MacFamily Tree and so far it has all worked well. for me. It costs £39.95 and can be bought from Amazon here: Mac Family Tree Software.
