family trees. I'm currently runnning Windows XP Professional but a program
that ran on multiple operating systems - including Windows XP! - would be
fine. I'm a Java programmer so I _like_ programs that run on many platforms
I would strongly prefer a free program to one that I have to pay for. I am
_not_ a serious genealogist and don't expect to be. Mind you, I am quite
interested in history in general, particularly 20th century history, so I
_could_ become serious about it
I don't intend to go back beyond my grandparents generation at the moment,
although we already have some documentation that goes back to the 18th
century for my father's side of the family.
At the moment, my main goal is to create some trees that identify the people
in the family photo albums and show how they are related. For instance,
Grandpa X and Grandma Y married and had 4 children, A, B, C, and D. A
married P and gave birth to me. B and Q got married and gave birth to S and
T, my cousins. S and T each got married and had such and such children who
are my nephews and nieces. That kind of thing.
It would be great if the trees could easily show some basic biographical
data like the person's name, nickname, date of birth, place of birth, date
of death, place of death but didn't insist on all information being supplied
because I don't know some things for some people. It would also be great if
the program had an ability to insert a thumbnail picture of the person at
some recognizable age. The program should have the ability to handle
accented letters since some of the family tree originates in Europe.
It would be _really_ neat if the family tree had some kind of integration
with an computerized photo album! I would love to be able to click on a name
in a family tree and then be taken to all the different pictures of that
person in an album and to be able to click on an individual in one of the
photos in the album and be taken to the appropriate branch of the family
tree to find out more about this person. But I'm not naive; I'm not sure if
anyone makes a decent free (or even shrinkwrap!) program that does that!
I'm quite comfortable with computers in general as well as programming and
databases so I'm not intimidated by a fairly sophisticated program. I just
don't want to spend any serious money on software for this purpose
I realize that I could find programs via Google but I'm hoping to save time
by asking the experts here for their recommendations of the best programs
for my purpose.
--
Rhino