
Thankfully, the Standard version contains everything you need to record your family history on. Freebies are thin on the ground, but Legacy 7.5 is one such tool that exists as both a cut-down freebie (Standard) and paid-for (Deluxe) version. Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of dedicated family history packages out there, but most cost money. This is all well and good, but having used your computer to research your family history, it also makes sense to record the database-like details of your family tree on it too. Websites like and make it easy to search millions of digitised records in seconds, helping you piece together the past lives of your ancestors. And thanks to the internet, discovering your past doesn’t have to involve trips to track down local records offices or dusty church registers, opening up what was a niche pastime to millions.

But as the author points out, "Ahnenblatt is a freeware program made by a single person in his spare time as a hobby", it's hardly fair to criticise him for not living up to the standards of commercial software.Īnd aside from that, Ahnenblatt is a surprisingly capable tool with a stack of features which makes it very easy to organise, present and share your genealogy data.You don’t have to be a celebrity to have an interesting family history. If there's a small issue here it's that the Help file is available solely in German. Or, if you want to share the information with others, your data can be saved as a GEDCOM file, an HTML page, an entire web site, a Windows Help file, XML or CSV files, even burned to CD.


Click Extras/ Show All Picture Files within the sample project, for instance, and you can review all the photos you've gathered so far - an excellent way to bring your work to life. There are plenty of handy extra tools here.

You can define all the information you need about every ancestor, for instance: their parents, siblings, marriages and children baptism, confirmation and funeral-related details pictures and other related files, details on sources, text notes and more.Īll this can be presented as a family tree, an ancestors tree, an hourglass chart, or in the form of multiple lists (Ancestors, Descendants, Family, Birthday and more). And the simplest way to see how it all works is to click File > Open and choose one of the sample trees, then explore the various options. The program installs easily, no worries about adware or anything else (there's not as much as a "Donate" button). Ahnenblatt is a free tool which makes it easy to create and manage a family tree.
