My Family Tree

Genealogical trees illustrate a family's entire legacy, which makes them invaluable. If you have the possibility of tracking down your ancestors, it would be a shame not to create a family tree. The main advantage of My Family Tree is that you can add various descriptions, about a single person, which will never fit on a printed or drawn tree. It provides various ways to view the relations between your relatives and a very large number of tools, which you can use to write down your family's entire history.

My Family Tree is free. Its setup package is almost 2 and a half Mb large, so it will not take long to install it. The software works on Windows XP and all the later editions. Its system requirements are not high, which makes it possible to run it even on older machines.

Family trees are created and saved just like any other projects. When launching the software, you will find a small menu on its interface, with options for creating a new tree, opening an existing one or importing GEDCOM files. If you choose to create a new tree, you will have to insert a few details about the first family member, before loading the core functions on the interface. You need to specify the person's gender, name, last name, date and place of birth.

The interesting part of My Family Tree is the fact that it lets you set the year of birth to AD or BC, so if you can track down your ancestors, all the way to the ancient Romans, you can add them to your tree without any problems. It is also possible to specify an approximate date of birth by selecting a description like "about", "before", "after", "estimated" and so on.

The added persons are displayed on the larger area of the software's interface, along with their name, year of birth and age. Details about a selected person and his relatives are displayed on the right side of the interface, where you may add photos as well and many other information. If you add photos, they will be displayed in the tree as well. A series of buttons, in the same area, will take you to various sections of the interface, where you can edit someone's details, add more photos and a story, insert videos and audio files or set up the relationships between a person and his parents, siblings and other relatives. For example, you can select a parent from a drop menu, and click a radio button to set the relationship to natural, adopted, foster or witness.

If you select the first person, you will see his entire genealogical tree, with all his ancestors. If you select one of his ancestors, other persons, from the other side of the family will be hidden. To make it more clear, if you select someone's mother, her in-laws and all their ancestors will be hidden. Her husband's icon will display a symbol, indicating the fact that his ancestors are hidden.

The interface's top menus reveal various options for printing, saving your project as a file, web page or a GEDCOM file, backing up and sharing your tree. You can also find numerous tools, such as a date calculator, phonetics calculator, GEDCOM validator and many more. If you have acquired information about one of your ancestors from a book, you may specify its title, author, publisher and many other details.