Mac users have had to suffer from a lack of really good, professional-class genealogy programs. This has not changed to any great extent, but there are some very fine products on the market, both commercially and via shareware and freeware. It all depends upon what you need. Additionally, with the advent of tools like BootCamp, Parallels, and VMWare, a whole new vista (oops…sorry) of genealogy programs and utilities are now available to Mac users.
In the beginning, there was Personal Ancestral File (PAF), published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). This was a really nice little program, with a really well thought out graphical user interface. Unfortunately, lack of Mac users meant that the LDS Church software developers used their very limited resources where they could do the most good–on the Windows platform. I used PAF extensively, back in the 80s and 90s, and even used it to assemble information used to publish the 750 page Grinnell family genealogy, back in 1997. I had to use a combination of Mac and PC programs to achieve my goal, but the end result came out quite well.
If there is only one contribution made by the genealogists at the LDS Church for which the entire genealogical community should be eternally grateful, it would be the development of the GEDCOM (GEnealogical Data COMmunications) standard. GEDCOM files put the contents of a linked genealogical database into a common file format that can be opened by virtually any other genealogy program on the planet. The basic file format is ASCII, so it is easily transportable, and can be compressed with standard file compression tools to as much as 10% of its original size. Without GEDCOM, we wouldn’t have any of the great tools and open exchange of information that we have today.
Briefly, one of the prime tenets of the Mormon faith is the ability to bring your deceased ancestors into the Church, so they can share in the faith and the hereafter (if I get this wrong, including appropriate capitalizations, please accept my deepest apologies). This requires that members of the Church perform extensive and scientifically valid genealogical research to identify as many of their ancestors as far back as possible. This is why the LDS Church has amassed the world’s largest collection of genealogical information, mainly on microfilm, though much of this is now being digitized. The master films and computer files are stored in a nuclear blast-resistant vault bored into a mountain somewhere in Utah. Any member of the public can access this information, either by visiting the main LDS Library in Salt Lake City, UT, or by visiting any local LDS church that has a Family History Center. At these centers, which are proselytizing-free zones (no one is going to try to get you to join their church unless you want to–the goal being an open, friendly, and convivial atmosphere for research and sharing of research results), you can go through the online or CD-based “card catalog” of their holdings. If you want to view more details, you pay a small fee to defray the costs of duplicating microfilms or CDs, which are ordered and shipped from the main LDS Library in Salt Lake to your local Family History Center (FHC). You will be notified when the research material arrives. For a small additional fee, these materials can be kept at your local FHC permanently. Oh, and the main card catalog is also available on the web at http://www.familysearch.org, too. Bottom line: if you are doing serious genealogical research, you should take advantage of this fantastic resource.
Other excellent sources for online research, which will cost you a lot more money to use, are ancestry.com, genealogy.com, and familyhistory.com.
Oh, yeah, we were talking about genealogy on the Macintosh. When I digress, I really digress!
While PAF was the first really popular genealogy program for the Mac back in the 80s, other products were out there, too. Family Tree Maker, probably the most popular genealogy software around, once was available on the Mac platform, back around version 3.0 (it’s now up to version 16). Others like MacGene have disappeared from view.
Today, there is one dominant genealogy program for the Macintosh, Leister Productions’ Reunion 9.0. This is a really terrific program, lots of research options, lots of reports, etc. It really makes fantastic use of the Mac user interface, as only a program originally developed in HyperCard would do. At $100, it’s not exactly cheap, but it really does the job. It’s even sold at Apple Stores. Another up-and-coming product (also sold at many Apple Stores) is MacFamilyTree, currently at version 4.4. Written by a German developer, there are many languages available. My main beef with this product is the lack of standard genealogical reports–rather, the developer has chosen to take a more graphic approach, which may be fine for sharing with family members, but less fine when preparing reports to share.
In the freeware category, there’s the program PAWriter II, which looks and feels very much like the old PAF program. It includes a few interesting utilities, including one that will generate a standard descendant register report file in MMF format that can be imported into Adobe FrameMaker, a very advanced page layout program that is no longer produced for the Mac. This file is fully format-tagged (a rarity in genealogy software) that makes it very easy to play with formats and typography on a global basis.
There are also several really useful shareware tools, including GEDitCOM, a genealogy database that lets you stay in the GEDCOM environment; and the amazingly named The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding (TNG). TNG is an extremely powerful genealogical database that harnesses the power of the open source MySQL database and the PHP programming language. TNG is a website, designed to work with Apache (included in OSX), or Microsoft Internet Information Server. This program, selling for only $29.00, lets you build a powerful, interactive website with your genealogy data. You can control access. You can control whether people see information on living people or not (this is a big concern with individuals worried about identity theft). You can permit people to directly edit your database records, or limit them to “suggestions” that can be acted upon. The neat thing is, you can use this as a genealogy program. All you need to do is turn on Personal Web Sharing on your Mac, but keep the firewall closed off, so it doesn’t talk to the outside (and so the outside can’t talk to you!). I’m using this program for the Grinnell Family Association website, to manage a 30,000 person database. Because we’re getting ready to publish a new printed genealogy sometime soon, we aren’t using this as our sole database, but we might at some future date. Data entry is a little tedious but the charts and reports are really neat–I love watching pedigree charts generate on the fly–how geeky is that?
As with all genealogy software of any stature, these two programs fully support the GEDCOM vers. 5.5 file format standard. The only caveat is when you accept GEDCOM files from PC users. Family Tree Maker (FTM) has taken many liberties with the GEDCOM format, providing additional data fields for more detailed information (locations, cemeteries, and other life events). Programs like Reunion, unless they have been written to fully import non-compliant GEDCOM files, will not import the fields it doesn’t understand, dumping that information to an error log.
Finally (I’ll bet you thought this would never come), for the true dyed in the wool genealogists who need the absolute best tools out there, if you have an Intel-powered Mac, BootCamp (or Parallels or VMWare), and some recent variation on Windows, you can always use a Windows-based program. There are some truly excellent products with amazing charting and reporting capabilities. In these really advanced programs, you can manipulate data to your heart’s content, isolating information on one individual, or on hundreds of individuals. Broderbund’s Family Tree Maker is, again, the most popular program out there. It has dozens of reports and charts and there is a small cottage industry of developers who have created additional modules for the product. Next is Brother’s Keeper (BK), written by John Steed. This shareware product is supported by one of the most responsive developers out there. Back in the 80s when I used Brother’s Keeper (in the dark DOS days), I would email John about a suggestion or after finding a bug, and I would get a set of disks in the mail within a few days with the changes. BK has a rich set of reports and charts, too. For me, however, the granddaddy of them all is The Master Genealogist (TMG), by Wholly Genes. TMG has literally hundreds of reports and charts, and special search criteria, and is just the bee’s knees when it comes to an advanced genealogy program. It, too, supports a small cottage industry of developers who have written additional utilities, report generators, chart makers, and more.
If I were a genealogy professional and needed the absolute best program out there, The Master Genealogist would be it for me. If I could only do it within the MacOS, it would be Reunion, without a doubt.
Most genealogists use multiple programs, as some programs have better features than others. I use another little-known Windows-based genealogy program, called Heritage Family Tree–only because it has a superb
Future software will support structured editing in XML, with transformation engines to generate a book at the very end of the editorial process–something I know I am looking forward to.
I know I’ve thrown a lot of information at you. If you have more questions, please leave a comment, and I’ll try to answer. Also, check the links to these various products, and you might be able to find the answers there.
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