One Thing to Another

It was somewhat remiss of me last week to fail to mention that we do have our own Genealogy topic here at the Suite edited by Christine Sievers.

This in turn led me to start thinking about building a family tree. A powerful incentive here was my own parents asking "when will it be ready?" At times like this I have been known to regret being the resident computer guy!

An equally powerful incentive was the increasing frequency of incoming mile long e-mails. The ability to wing photographs around the world is wonderful but the time they take to download... sigh. This situation is improved by the fast creation of a photo gallery at one of the free home page hosting sites. Quick distribution of the URL around the family with the invitation... come see... come get... one bottleneck eased. Any image can be downloaded from the Internet by a simple right click of the mouse on the image itself and selection of Save as.

Leading on from this is the organisation of all the raw data and images into all the right branches. Surely some kind generous programmer out there has created a freebee genealogy program that will make stage two nice and easy.

The search didn't take long.

The Daniel Morin Home Page extended me a very nice welcome, showed me a good-looking photograph and generally came across as a very professional site. Most important it led me to exactly what I was seeking. To quote Dan's own words:

If you are interested in building your own family tree, you should download Generations. Generations is a program I wrote to build genealogy trees and with scanned photos. Generations is entirely FREE; if you like Generations and think it worth the cost of a post card plus a stamp, then send me a post card.

This collection of linked pages is one of the best laid out and organised descriptions of a program I have ever seen. Screen shots abound, the FAQ section is superb and everything is very detailed. Every author's home page should be this good.

One feature leapt out at me immediately.

Multiple page printing. Generations can print a genealogy tree up to a maximum of 22,500 pages.

Hmmm... that should be sufficient!

From a quick e-mail chat I had with Dan I can assure you he is very committed to ongoing development of the program. Quite simply he is determined that Generations will be the best program of its kind. I for one think he will succeed.

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