All of these products offer a free demo that you can download to try it out before you buy.įREE AND EASY: Family Tree Builder by MyHeritage helps you stay organized with streamlined screens to work in and doesn’t require a lot of startup time. I really don’t think you need the physical boxed product.

In many cases, you can order the product or purchase a digital download. What’s the best genealogy software? It depends on how much you want to spend and how sophisticated you want your database to be. There are lots of family history programs out there, and all of them will serve your basic needs. Then you can upload or synch your data to your favorite genealogy websites whenever you want–and you never lose control of your research. But my recommendation is to build your tree at home, in your own software. Keep this file as a backup both on your computer and in a second location (like cloud storage). If you do choose to build your family tree online, make sure you can download your tree anytime as a GED file. These days it can communicate your research to any genealogy sites you care to share with–by using those same GEDCOM files. GED files (called GEDCOMs), a universal file type that allowed researchers using different software to share their findings. But you may wonder what will happen to millions of carefully-constructed trees if the company goes out of business or the site goes down.īefore the days of internet genealogy, researchers organized family history findings on their home computers in specially-designed software. Just about every major genealogy website these days lets you build your family tree from scratch right on their website.

Free genealogy software for macs