(+) Where is Genealogy Technology Headed?

NOTE: This article contains personal opinions.

The genealogy software world is changing around us. This week, I thought I would look at the history of such software and then look into the crystal ball to see if the future can be discerned.

I have been using genealogy programs in my home computers for 34 years. In 1984, I started with Family Ties, a program written by Neil Wagstaff. I ran it on a homemade CP/M computer with two 8-inch floppy disk drives and a huge memory capacity of 64 kilobytes. No, that is not a typo error: those were 8-inch floppy disks drives. Many of today's computer users have never seen an 8-inch floppy disk although the later 5 1/2-inch and 3 1/2-inch disks became quite popular.

Over the years, I kept upgrading both the hardware and the software in use. I upgraded from the CP/M operating system to MS-DOS, then to Windows 2.0 and through a series of Windows releases: 3.0, 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000 (which I still believe is the best version of Windows ever released), Windows XP, and Windows Vista. In fact, after using Vista for a few weeks, I finally made my best upgrade: to Macintosh OS X. (I really hated Windows Vista!)

Along the way, I have used many different genealogy programs: Family Ties, Genealogy on Display, The Family Edge, Personal Ancestral File (versions 1, 2, 3, and 4), Roots II, Roots III, Roots IV, Visual Roots, Ultimate Family Tree, Family Origins, Legacy, RootsMagic, The Master Genealogist, Reunion, MacFamilyTree, Heredis, and, most recently, Family Tree Builder. I have also used GRAMPS (for Linux, Windows, and Macintosh), GedStar (originally for Palm handheld computers), and The Pocket Genealogist (for Windows Mobile handheld computers) as well as The Next Generation of Genealogy Site Building and PhpGedView, both of which store their databases on web servers. Because of articles I have written in this newsletter over the past twenty-two years and in other online publications prior to the newsletter, I have also briefly used many other genealogy programs and have written reviews of many of them.

I won't claim to be an expert, but I do think I am experienced at a wide variety of genealogy programs. I also believe that I can see some trends. Today I thought I would write about those trends and even attempt to forecast the future. I won't go too far into the future, perhaps five years or so. After that, my crystal ball gets a bit cloudy.