Best Genealogy Software Reviews

Genealogy software is used to collect, collate and organize information about your family history and your ancestry. It can often create wonderful family trees and can be displayed visually with relevant pictures creating a wonderful memorial and family treasure. Our number one product, Family Tree Maker, is a fantastically sleek and powerful genealogy tool and database tool, and can create highly presentable and professional ancestry information making it easy to find your ancestors. Our number two software, RootsMagic, is highly versatile and able to create stunning media presentations from the data you import and based on your family. Both of these products and the others in our reviews of the best family tree software in 2018 are high-quality and come highly recommended. They all can help you create a lasting and valuable record of your family’s history. 

What is genealogy software?

Genealogy, the act of researching family histories and ancestor information, is an increasingly popular and easily-accessible hobby, which can provide a fascinating insight into where your family came from, the jobs they performed to the areas they lived and more. Previously this could be an extremely difficult or arduous task, with scattered records meaning it would be a lot of work to track even a couple of generations back and tracking individuals being hard. However, the advent of digitalised records and online availability of these records, from census through to town hall records and court records, has meant that all of these files are readily and easily available, without the need to hire an expensive researcher. Yet this abundance of information comes with the downside of making sense of so much data and tracking down individuals with either scattered records or other people with similar names and occupations and as such an industry has sprung up around making organising genealogical research much more organised and easy to do.

A major feature of the best family tree software is that it is intended to allow an easy organising of your researched information, creation of ancestral tree, categorisation of information, and so forth. It is also often great for sharing and collating information with other people and family members, maybe if they’ve done some of their own research you want to put together, or simply if you want to show people the results of what you have done. The best genealogy software makes this simple and allows you to be a lot more organised and efficient in your research and presentation as you attempt to find family members.

Family tree software also complements or provides access to the type of information you are looking for, often through giving access or some sort of compatibility with ancestry-focused websites. For anybody wanting to learn more about their family history or wanting to put together what they already have, the best genealogy software is an essential purchase.

What is the best genealogy software?

After our review of the best family tree software to use in 2018, Family Tree Maker qualified as our #1. Possessing strong links to Ancestry.com, one of the world’s largest genealogy records sites, it makes creating organised, detailed and pleasant-on-the-eye documents about your ancestors and family members an absolute breeze. An organised and attract interface, with robust charting and documentation tools make this a powerful yet easy-to-use example of the best genealogy software.

Task management, filters, research organisers, and various tabs, including the all-important People tab, make this a fantastic piece of software for managing both large and small projects.

We rank Family Tree Maker as the best of the best family tree software due to its abundance of features, all of which are accessible and useful to both casual and advanced users, and it is ancestral tree software at its best and most well-designed.

Important features for many users include:

• Strong, built-in links to Ancestry.com allow quick and easy importation of relevant details and documents
• An attractive, clean interface
• It’s accessibility belies the incredible depth and organisation potential
• Great for casual users, and many useful features such as bibliographies and sourcing for those working in an official capacity or wanting to make very formal documentation

How to choose the best genealogy software?

The best genealogy software will often require large amounts of varied data to be inputted into it, a sleek and well-organised but detailed interface is key to a quality product. Some family tree software is in partnership with or provides compatibility with one or more ancestral or census or similar databases. As such it can be important to find software that is compatible with any subscriptions or services that you might have or potentially might want to sign up to. This is something to keep in mind as you read reviews of the best family tree software in 2018.

It is also important that the best genealogy software can categorize your information and filter it allowing you to create easily searchable and easily presentable lists. This can make researching, especially on a very large project, much quicker and easier. It is also important to consider how you want to present your research as some programs provides that the ways to present your findings the thing such as graphs and charts compared to others. Some provide basic ways to display information but some provide more complicated ways to present data in forms such as timelines or narrative reports. Many people also like to include the citations and bibliographies of work they have used and so software that provides an easy way to do this is often useful.