Software
Review of: |
 Create
Family Trees, distributed by Individual Software Corporation, is a genealogy
program. It will allow you to create your family tree quickly and easily.
It does do that, well enough to get you introduced into genealogy and your
family tree. You also get a separate disk that is the SSDI (Social
Security
Death
Index.)
The SSDI contains information on more than 61 million individuals who died
since 1962. Create Family Trees even comes with an instruction manual,
which nowadays is somewhat of a rarity. It also has a help file within
the program, so you don't need the manual, but it is handy.
Create Family Trees will allow you to create a data sheet on each family member, record detailed information about each person, add photographs and documents related to those people, and create Ancestor or Pedigree family trees automatically. For each person you can include dates, birth and death locations, and marriage information. You can record notes, and military info, and so on. You can show family members that have remarried, and show adopted, foster and other special relationships. When you load the program, it asks you to create a new database, and then allows you to start typing in names and information. You could also import the information into the program, using a GEDCOM file. This GEDCOM file is a universal format that was created way back when genealogy programs first started. This way researchers could share info regardless of which programs they were using. Luckily for us, the industry has kept this going, so we actually benefit. This way if you want to send the info to another family member, you export the database into a GEDCOM file, put it on disk or the Internet or email, and the person who receives the file can import it into their program. Pretty nifty. With Create Family Trees, you get a little list (called the "individual list") that appears on a screen. This, I found is somewhat annoying sometimes, but I guess I just need to get used to it. As you place names into the program onto an "individual worksheet,” they appear on this list. You can then grab names from the list and drag and drop it to where you want it on the tree. So you have, say, a set of parents. You enter their kids into the individual list, and then drag them to the area to the left of the parents. Or, if you don't like dragging and dropping, you can right click on the name in the list, and add a relationship. I didn't find either of these methods, though, to be user friendly. I have used other genealogy programs that make this so much easier. Better buttons at the top of the screen, and more intuitively done. And when you double click on a name in the list, you'd like for the name to appear (it does) AND for the family tree in the background to shift to that individual. But you have to make additional clicks to tell it to "go to" the name in the tree. Extra steps that after a while add up. Once you get all the names you want into the tree, you can then Search for any particular person, or use the Analyze tools to Find Duplicates (finds entries that are the same names, and allows you to check them out.), Find Orphans (finds names that are not linked to any others), Find Circular Links (performs an analysis of the Family Database for circular referenced names and informs you when the analysis has been resolved and completed.), or Find Invalid Dates (finds dates that do not make sense, such as the person was born after he died). You can also show the relationship between two different people on the list with the “Show Relationship” tool. You can print different charts. There is a Pedigree chart (which prints out a chart including as few or as many generations as you specify), an Immediate family chart (prints out a chart including spouse, children, and parents), and a Descendants report (includes information on all the descendants from a selected family member.). You can even print the pictures that you bring into the program on the charts. Pretty cool. I particularly like it that you can preview any chart or report before you print it. You can even zoom in on the preview to make sure it is what you expect. Great feature. My recommendation:
Minimum requirements:
For the SSDI, you will need a Pentium-based PC or higher; Windows 95, 98, or NT;16 MB RAM; 10 MB of Hard Drive space; a 4x speed CD-ROM.; a 256 Color VGA or higher display; and a mouse. (I did run this one on my old 486, and it did run — just slowly.) Availability:
Individual Software Inc Joe LaBonté |