(updated
When I was a kid, I used to use PAF to look at the family history research that my mom had done. I remember the old text-based PAF for DOS, which was probably one of the first computer programs I ever used. Back then, and into the early ’00s, PAF was the genealogy program. Sure, there were others, but they tried their best to be compatible with PAF, or at the very least, with the GEDCOM format, which was designed by the same people who designed PAF. If you wanted a full-featured genealogy program that was highly likely to work with other programs, PAF was your best choice. And it was free.
Things have changed since then. PAF is no longer actively developed, as the LDS church has turned its focus to familysearch.org. You can run PAF on current Windows machines, and there are even some companies that make plugins to address some of its usability hurdles. But it is not the standard that it once was.
Of course, none of this helps me, because I no longer run Windows, and PAF for Mac hasn’t worked since OS 9. After several years of storing things in folders and text files, I decided it was time to go app shopping.
Future proof. Best would be if it works for the next 50 years of my life, but that’s probably too much to ask. Instead, I will settle for requiring good GEDCOM support. I’m not interested in any bells and whistles that allow me to add information that I can’t export, because then it will be stuck when I am inevitably forced to change programs.
Customizable. In my looking around, I have accepted the fact that I will not be able to find a program that will do everything I want. In particular, nothing can print the reports I want to print. One thing I liked about PAF was that it would let you export csv files of any information you want. This was another way of making sure that things you put in will be able to come out.
Easy to use. Screens are 4 times larger than when I was a kid. You should at least be able to fit as much on the screen as the old PAF did.
Here are my thoughts. To be honest, I started this blog post with the impression that there was nothing that was going to work for me. As I wrote, however, I became convinced that Reunion was what I was looking for. It won’t do everything that I want, but it is in my opinion enough above all the other options that there is no point spending money on any of the others.
I found Reunion to be one of the easiest programs to work in. I love the two column view that puts a couple in the middle, their parents above, and their children below. I’ve always found it easiest to do family history work when focused on families instead of individuals, but so many other programs make this difficult. Also, I love that Reunion takes advantage of multiple windows, allowing you to use that screen space well. I love the “ages” view and all the different views it allows you to use. Also, Reunion has been around for a long time and isn’t going to leave. It allows you to make notes with sources appearing as footnotes in the source, much like PAWriter (below), but in a more standard GEDCOM manner. I probably wouldn’t trust these footnotes to import into another system, though. I’d have to see how it exports to GEDCOM.
On the bad side, Reunion is by far the most expensive of the bunch at $100. Its reports are not very good, but then good reports are hard to make.
MacFamilyTree is beautiful and has some very nice features. At one point, I was sure I was going to buy it. It has good integration with familysearch.org. It has some nice modern touches, with Google Earth views and some 3D pedigree charts. In the end, though, I couldn’t look past how difficult it is to enter data. Adding a birth date takes a few clicks and a couple different pages. There is no way to see all the information about a person in a single view.
There are many things I like about Geditcom. First, it stores all records in GEDCOM format. This means that you always know everything you are doing is going to be exportable. You can even put the file under revision control (which the author of Geditcom actually encourages). The author provides Python and AppleScript libraries to allow you to make completely custom reports. Even the reports that ship with Geditcom can be edited. Geditcom is free if you want to use it as a GEDCOM reader only.
Unfortunately, working in Geditcom is difficult. Data entry is tough, and some things just don’t work.
[Update: The release of Geditcom 1.7 seems to solve some of the things that weren’t working for me (like the Latex report), and the developers are making progress on ease of use. It is still not as easy as Reunion, but maybe it makes up for that with its custom reports and its use of straight GEDCOM. When I finish my thesis, maybe I’ll get back into genealogy and let you know how things turn out.]
PAWriter is the closest to PAF of any of the programs that I have tried.
I am a little worried, because it seems like there is a single developer working on this program, and I fear that one day he may abandon it and no one will take his place. Also, the way it does footnotes is nonstandard. It certainly wouldn’t import into another program.
Lifelines is very powerful, although probably too difficult to use on a daily basis. One of the best parts of Lifelines is its ability to make completely custom reports. On the down side, the reports are written in a custom programming language, which makes it a bit of a hassle. Also, you cannot open GEDCOM files directly with Lifelines, you have to import them. So if I were to use Lifelines only to print reports (since it is pretty unusable as a tree editor), there would be a lot of extra steps involved every time.
Someday I plan to buy Reunion. Right now I am busy and poor, so spending that much money on something I don’t really have time to use seems silly. But with the tinkering I’ve done, I am convinced that it is the best.
I will also write a Python script to process GEDCOM files and make nice reports. Then when I want a complicated report, I can export the GEDCOM, run my script, and have something pretty to look at.