Re: Looking for a Genealogy program

[Steve Hayes]

On Tue, 3 Mar 2015 13:40:29 -0500, Gary <gar...@hotmail.com> wrote:

>I've been using Family Tree Maker for the past 20-or-so years to
>document my family tree. The program seems excellent except they are
>charging you not only for the program itself, but also for add-ons for
>many things you want to do when using it.
>
>I've gotten fed up with the program when, in their 2012 version, they
>offer you many hints that would let you update people on your tree with
>better dates (birth, marriage, death) or with copies of important
>documents (census, identifying cards, etc.) BUT you have to pay them
>additional in order to be able to save that information. It makes me
>wonder why I paid for the program in the first place.
>
>Can anyone suggest other genealogy programs that will help users with
>their research without trying to hit you up for further fees?

Legacy and RootsMagic have free versions, so you can try them out to
see if you like them.

You may continue using the free versions as long as you like.

There are also extra features that you can pay for if you want them.
You will need to pay for them again on a major version upgrade, if you
wish to upgrade (but you don't have to).

RootsMagic loads faster than Legacy, but I find the Legacy screen
layout and features easier to use than RootsMagic.

Legacy uses the MS Access database format.
RootsMagic uses the SQLite database format.

With any program, if they link you to hints of data that may be
available on external sites, you may have to pay to use those sites.


--
Steve Hayes
Web: http://hayesgreene.wordpress.com/
http://hayesgreene.blogspot.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/afgen/

[J. Hugh Sullivan]

>Steve Hayes

What he said.... :)

Hugh

[Dora Smith]

I didn't clip anything from below, because I like Steve's answer.

I got fed up with Family Tree Maker ten years ago, and with each new edition they get worse. Wouldn't print ambiguous dates how I enter them and doesn't include other wives and their children in ancestor reports (which three different genealogical societies assured me IS the correct way, the software developers are just being cheap), did it for me, and then there was learning that Family Tree Maker takes up all sorts of system resources by storing media that you associate with each person with the tree instead of merely linking to it.

In short, Family Tree Maker is really great, for the all too common family that wants nothing more than to document their family history forward from grandparents or great grandparents complete with the family pictures. For serious researchers that's not your tool.

Legacy and Rootsmagic have been the best software for years, and remain so.

I've been using Rootsmagic, which does better web sites, and prettier reports, but lately the reports don't do what I want and one seems to have to jump through weird hoops to do a number of things. I'm thinking of going back to Legacy. I own Legacy 7 and need to upgrade to 8 if I want to use Family Search.

PAF didn't do a half bad job at reports, just not real pretty, and still works in Windows 7. Don't know about Windows 8.

Dora