Online vs Offline Family Trees

July 26, 2018 4:49 PM

I have access to Ancestry.com through my university library so I don't have an individual account with them. I do not wish to spend money on offline software as I'm struggling a bit financially right now but I am concerned about using free web-based family trees.

Am I being paranoid about collating all this information and putting it online? Is there a decent free software that I can download that doesn't require an online account with the service? Or should I not worry and just use any of the free websites that let me build a tree online?

posted by acidnova to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

My grandpa used Gramps to build a family tree of about 3000 people. It's free, open source, and actively maintained.
posted by waninggibbon at 5:33 PM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

It's been a few years since I played with family tree software, but unless things have changed, there is a common export/import format for family trees called "gedcom." I assume online software can at least export to it, and it used to be that every offline program could read and write it (I believe it was pioneered by the Mormon family research centers; they produced the one of the standard family tree systems for many years). At the very least, if you grow uncomfortable with Ancestry, you can export your data and keep it safe until you find another system. Gramps, as mentioned by waninggibbon, supports gedcom import/export.
posted by lhauser at 9:15 PM on July 26, 2018

Best answer: I haven't been too worried about collating the information and putting on line but I do worry about losing access to it, particularly the details like images of actual census pages that wouldn't get downloaded. So I search on ancestry and do the linkage to keep track of what I found but also download everything into a copy on my own computer (including copies of relevant images).

I had started on PAF which was free from the Latter Day Saints. When they discontinued it, here are some free/low cost alternatives they recommended.
posted by metahawk at 11:45 PM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks! I tried a few of the suggestions and the RootsMagic option (via the LDS website) seems to be the most user-friendly for simply entering information on people and having it generate a basic chart. I've already done so much of the research and have tons of names written down in a notebook, I just wanted to input them into an organized tree.
posted by acidnova at 12:07 AM on July 27, 2018

The mormons are now making people register on familysearch before they can use it.
posted by brujita at 12:31 AM on July 27, 2018

I had this same thought process a while back: my mom had a crazy-old copy of Family Tree Maker on her Windows XP computer, which is less than reliable.

I saved all of that to a thumb drive, got it running on my Mac (with Wine), and then exported all the records to GEDCOM format. Then I installed Gramps and imported everything.

My mom calls me once a year now to make a calendar of everyone's birthdays, which FTM maker could do, and which I couldn't figure out how to get Gramps to produce. I print it to PDF and email it to her.

I have found some good stuff on Ancestry.com (which I also access through a free account at my town library); I grab the images of stuff like WWII Veterans Headstone Request Forms, and copy the information into a text file, and that can go into Gramps later at home.

Now I control my data -- not Ancestry.com, not the Mormons, not anybody who wants to monetize my family history.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:43 AM on July 27, 2018 [2 favorites]