Rootsmagic – free public beta

I know I haven’t been posting much, and I’m behind on my emails as well. :( The reason is that I am working on the yearbook for my youngest’s elementary school. The deadline is fast approaching, so I’ve had to spend a lot of my time on that. But I did want to make a quick post about Rootsmagic 4. It is currently in public beta — meaning it’s free for anyone to download and try out until March 31.

Now I have been a long-time user of Legacy Family Tree. I’m mostly happy with it, but I’m getting a little disappointed with the lingering bugs in reports with regards to printing sources. So I downloaded Rootsmagic earlier today to give it a try. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, I don’t have a whole lot of time to really play with it right now, but I am hoping to test it out more during the free trial.

I’ll likely post more about this in the future. I’d also be interested to hear what other people think of the new Rootsmagic.

Genealogy Software

The software I use to store my genealogy data on my home computer is Legacy Family Tree from Millenia Corp. I use the deluxe (paid) version and currently have the latest release (v7). I’ve been using it nearly as long as I’ve been doing my genealogy research. I started with the standard (free) version 5. After several months, I decided to upgrade to the deluxe version for the increased feature set, and have continued to upgrade as new releases have become available. Along the way I’ve tried a few other products, but I keep coming back to Legacy as my software of choice.

Millenia introduced a source writer in version 7. I was very anxious to get this because I was hoping it would help me standardize my sources. I can’t honestly say it’s everything I hoped for, but it is certainly a big help in figuring out what relevant information to include – particularly for things like photographs and websites. Unfortunately the introduction of source writer appears to have generated some serious flaws in how the software creates footnotes, etc in the various reports. I am hoping that Millenia releases the promised patch soon as I have some reports that I would like to send out to various people and I really don’t want to go thru the hassle of hand editing the reports to fix the sources.

Other than that complaint, which I’m sure they will soon fix, I have been pretty happy with the software. If you are looking for genealogy software for a pc, be sure to check out Legacy Family Tree.