Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots
I’m curious, what software do you use to keep track of your family tree? I use Reunion, the software I started out with six years ago, and I really like it. But I don’t have any point of comparison.
I put together this poll to learn what my readers use, so I can figure out which software I should learn more about. I’d appreciate it if you’d take a moment and fill it out. I’d love to hear in the comments what you like and dislike about the software you use. Thanks!
I use Reunion on my Mac to keep track of my family tree. It’s the only software I’ve used, so I don’t have a basis of comparison, but I really like it.
My default view is the Family View and when I open the program, it starts at the base of the tree, with the records for my husband and me. At a session at the Midwestern Roots conference last year, I learned about creating a shortcut so that I can easily click on a person from anywhere on my tree to access their record. Reunion calls the area at the top of the screen the quickbar and it calls the individual name you put there a quickbar button.
I created quickbar buttons for my three ancestors for whom I have Civil War pension files because I access them a lot. I also added one for my great grandfather’s half-brother, Wayne Horace Adams (1907-1976), because otherwise to get to him, I have to first click on the red arrow to access his mother (his father’s second wife), which is a tiny hassle. (This year I’ve been trying to figure out Horace’s late childhood/early adulthood, so I’ve been spending time with him.) Click on the picture at the top of this post to see a larger photo of my opening Family View screen with the quickbar buttons at the top. (To protect my husband’s privacy, I blurred out his info and our marriage date.)
It’s extremely easy to add a quickbar button. Within the Family View just click on the person in question and drag him/her to the quickbar at the top of the screen. Reunion will ask you to give the quickbar button a name. To remove it, just drag it to the trashcan icon on the Mac. You can also click the little pencil icon on the far left of the quickbar to edit the buttons on it. And if you click the question mark icon you see in that edit menu, you’ll get lots more information on the quickbar.
I have found this to be so helpful, especially since I’m focusing on one family line this year. My great great grandfather G.W. Adams is the nexus of my research this year, so I click on his name pretty much every session. It’s really nice not to have to click my way up my tree to him!
I haven’t had a lot of time to play around with the Reunion 10, the family-tree software I use on my Mac, but one thing I have enjoyed is the Ages feature. I don’t know if this was available on Reunion 9, but if it was, it wasn’t as accessible.
Here’s how it works: Click on a couple in the Family View and on Ages in the left sidebar and in the right sidebar you’ll see exactly how old they were at the various that are entered in their event database. (You can toggle between the two members of the couple.)
For me, this brings these people back to life. I see, for example, that my maternal grandmother, Susie Brown, was 22 years, 9 months and 4 days old when she married my grandfather. And that she was between 25 and 33 when she moved from Missouri to Washington state. (I know that trip occurred in 1936, so she was actually 28 or 29.) I’d always known that my mother was 3 years old when that migration occurred, but I’d never thought about it from my grandmother’s perspective.
Perhaps since I always remembered my grandmother as an old person, I never bothered to think about what it must have been like for her, as a young woman, to move to a strange (perhaps exotic) part of the country. I haven’t really thought about what the over-the-road trip (this was before airplanes were commonly used) with two small children must have been like.
Of course, this makes me wish I’d quizzed her and my mother more when I was growing up. It’s not too late to ask my mother, but she’ll have no memory of the actual move. But she can share family lore.
Simply playing around with the Ages feature on one relative has sparked a whole line of inquiry. I can’t wait to see what it sparks as I use it more.
I use Reunion software on my Mac and today upgraded to version 10. I usually am pretty cautious about updating software that I’m happy with, but one look at the video outlining the new features and I was in. (And that was before I learned I could get the upgrade at no cost, since I’d bought Reunion 9 in 2012.)
I’d had no complaints with Reunion 9. When I started doing genealogy research 10 years ago, I hand wrote everything. But when I got serious about it again this year, I knew I needed software and I decided on Reunion, which is native for the Mac. So I had nothing to compare it to, but I was very pleased.
But Reunion 10 is even more exciting. They’ve added many easy-to-use reporting and charting features. They’ve also expanded what you can see on one screen and increased the ease of navigation.
As I’ve mentioned in a post about my research plan, my strategy is to use Reunion to document my family history research and to add nothing to it that has not been verified and properly sourced. At first that felt like kind of a drag…Reunion felt like a necessary evil. As I add data to it and watch my family tree grown, fully confident that the information contained in it is solid, Reunion is feeling more like a friend. And now that I have Reunion 10 to play with, it’s become an even more interesting friend. (Like going home from college with a friend and discovering she has a cute brother!)
Click below to see the video that outlines the improvements to Reunion 10. If you haven’t already updated, you might consider it!
