Genealogy Software

Family history research takes many forms. Many people wish to research their own family tree to find their ancestors as far back as they can along one or multiple lines.

Others are researching all the families in a particular geographical region (place study) or those with a particular surname (one name study). Demographic studies can also benefit from this type of software.

RWAP Software provide two valuable programs to enable you to carry out family history, both programs are by Chris Boutal (of Deltadrive Ltd):
QL Genealogist is a version written for the Sinclair QL and compatibles, and allows you to store a whole host of details about your family, even allowing you to build up a single tree of both your male and female ancestors.

Genealogy Research System is a much enhanced version of this software, written to run under the Windows operating system and building on both QL Genealogist and the earlier Genealogy for Windows program (also by Deltadrive). The Genealogy Research System proves an invaluable tool in the study of inheritance and genetics in both humans and animal breeding. Any work that involves tracing back through each generation for medical, financial or any other reason will benefit from this software.

The user friendly interface for both of these programs ensure that you do not waste valuable research time in learning how to use a new program in order to enter your data. In fact, you are asked to enter the information in pretty much the form that you find it - for example, birth certificates. The program then tries to match up the information which you have found against the people already in your family tree, asking you to verify whether each person is a match, a possible match or definitely not a match.

Tracing your family tree is a fascinating hobby that can grow throughout your lifetime and into retirement and who knows what pedigree your lineage will turn up! Many other interests complement family tree research and studies of local history, inheritance, gene research, genetics, heraldry, demography and many others may follow. The internet is making research easier and faster to do, although it must be noted that although there are hundreds of sites on the internet dedicated to genealogy, not all of them can be trusted as a source of historical information. Research on the internet must therefore be seen as one of several sources in helping you verify your family history. We have found that one of the best ideas on the net has to be GenesConnected (from the people who brought us FriendsReunited). The GenesConnected site allows you to create your family tree on-line and share it with other people, with the idea being that if someone is already researching part of your family tree, the two research links will be joined.

You will be able to leave a valuable inheritance as a result of your hobby for your own relatives and descendants if you publish your work.

A very useful site to help you track down ancestors is origins.net which provides access to definitive on-line databases of genealogical data, including English and Scottish records from 1538 onwards. They have now introduced their own internet search engine which trawls the internet looking specifically for genealogical data, using hundreds of defined spelling variants, misspellings, abbreviations and diminutives for both Christian names and surnames, which makes this an extremely powerful service for finding historical data about your origins.

Origins.net have also recently enhanced the data available for searches for Irish ancestors, providing data from censuses, ship's passenger lists, church records and even convict records. They have also added access to the definitive version of Griffith's Valuation (both indexes and images), said by many genealogists to be the "census substitute" for mid-19th century Ireland, plus other important Irish genealogy data from Eneclann on cd-rom, including the Index of Irish Wills, the William Smith O'Brien Petition and many other titles. This is a truly unique service, which, when coupled with the internet search engine and powerful name comparison engine (NameX), it would be difficult to find a more complete service for genealogical data for the United Kingdom.

All in all, this is an excellent service and it is easy to get an idea of the information available without having to join up - you can merely use the search bar to see how many entries are available for a given name within a specified period of years. Coupled with our range of programs for collating the genealogical information which you retrieve, this should provide the best all-round service for anyone interested in their family tree.

We would also recommend that you search through the National Archives, which provides the ability to search and view over a million Wills spanning the years 1384 to 1858, plus WW1 Campaign Medals, WWII Seaman's Medals and Famous people's Wills, including William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Sir Christopher Wren, Napoleon Bonaparte and Sir Francis Drake. All in all, this is an excellent service and provides a lot of interesting information as well as the assistance towards building up details of your family tree.

QL Genealogist (min 1920K required) £20
Review: QL World Jan'91, QL World Apr'92, QL Technical Review Vol 7, Quanta Oct'94
This is the pointer driven version of this very popular program for the budding family historian, which allows you to create a vast database of your family tree. It can produce a standard family tree diagram, and allows you to store details about each person, such as alternative spellings of names, parentage and children, details of events, such as births, deaths, marriages, baptisms and Wills. You can even link a text file or a picture with each person in the database. Research dates can be listed as approximate, before, after or invalid (to highlight where the dates were wrongly recorded in an original register). There are many other features which should meet the needs of all historians, and with a well written manual (including tutorial), this program should soon become a very useful tool in such research.

Sidewriter forms a useful complement to this program, allowing you to print family trees sideways on your printer
Prices / Upgrades
QL Genealogy

Genealogy Research System £30
(Windows 95/98/NT/2000/ME/XP or VISTA) (CD only)
This is a PC based version of the popular QL package. You can easily convert the QL data into a format suitable for use with the PC version.

The PC version is much enhanced, with form designers, ability to form genetic family trees and to handle GEDCOM format information. The layout is enhanced, making full use of the PC's more powerful graphics abilities and extra memory. Also, this program is event driven - as you enter a birth certificate, the program will automatically create an entry for all of the persons named on the certificate.

The program has also built on experience gained from the earlier Genealogy for Windows program and includes many more intelligent features, including the ability to use inbuilt internet tools and even DNA results capture and matching.

You can capture all kinds of information extracted from the internet as well as certificates, census returns, wills and other documents, GEDCOM files and spreadsheets as CSV files. Useful reports such as the census tracker enable you to work out where to look next and to see at a glance what information you already hold.

GRS includes powerful search facilities to help you find relationships and events easily. This includes soundex matching for surnames and automatic matching of maiden and married names.

Prices/ Upgrades