Taking a Dip in your Family Gene Pool

By Marianne Bray

The song "I’m My Own Granpaw" has been going through my head recently.

It’s because I’ve discovered that my brother is also my fourth cousin, a revelation as profound as when I learned that "genealogy" is the tracing of your roots, your family tree, and not the study of spirits trapped in bottles.

These insights came courtesy of Broderbund’s "Family Tree Maker" software, which has helped my family trace our ancestors right back to Jolly Olde England in the 1700’s.

Family Tree Maker Deluxe Edition II (Windows CD-ROM) is a reasonably straightforward program that lets you store your family’s data and use the resulting database to create your family tree. It analyzes kinships for you (which is how I found out my brother and I are also cousins – thanks to a marital quirk in generations past), and you can use it to print out a calendar of birthdays and anniversaries, create a family scrapbook – complete with pictures and your own captions – or focus on any branch of the family tree.

That isn’t all. Broderbund also throws in 2 World Family Tree CD-ROMs, two more with Social Security Death Benefit Records and you get a family finder that directs you where to find historical records for your lineage.

In all, Broderbund says you get family trees and records for some 60 million people.

I lost count at about 35 million, so I’ll have to take them at their word.

And if that isn’t enough, you can take advantage of "Family Tree Maker Online," an Internet-based resource at www.familytreemaker.com that’s made up of genealogy enthusiasts from all over. At that site, you can exchange information via message boards, post classified ads asking for information or leads, and get advice on how to track down your particular branch of the human race.

As for the software itself, it has an easy to use interface in which you merely enter information as you would with just about any other database-type program, and you can navigate the program easily from its menus and toolbar.

You even get a relatively (no pun intended) generous "Notes" section for each entry that lets you digitally store all the skeletons in your closet, and you can import Kodak PhotoCD, BMP and TIF files, as well as OLE objects.

Once your information is input, you can print your reports with a variety of fonts, borders, or other styles – to make your family tree as unique as your family. You can even print mailing labels, possibly so you can send that long lost rich uncle a notice that you’ve discovered your relationship and are rarin’ to start making up for lost time…

I was impressed to find that you can get away with only using up about ten meg of your hard drive with this program. That’s a welcome change from many of today’s packages, which seem to swallow hard drive space like governments swallow your hard earned cash.

Obviously, this software isn’t designed for everyone, but if you like hanging out in your family tree – or are just nosey enough that you want to poke around in other people’s histories, this is a product worth a look.

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