(+) Leave Your Existing Genealogy Program Behind and Look to the Future

Are you thinking about upgrading to a new computer, possibly including an upgrade to a new operating system? If so, this article is for you.

Over the years, a number of popular genealogy programs have been discontinued. Do you remember Personal Ancestral File, The Master Genealogist, CommSoft's Roots 5, Carl York's The Family Edge, Quinsept's Family Roots, Ultimate Family Tree, or SierraHome's Generations 8.0? Those and a number of other, lesser-known genealogy programs have all faded away over the years. May they all rest in peace.

The reasons for each program's demise vary, but a few themes seem common. Obviously, a lack of customers is often a major factor. Developing software, distributing it, and supporting it with a customer service department is not cheap. Any program needs to sell a lot of copies in order to generate enough revenue to cover expenses and hopefully to generate a profit for the producer. Some programs never sold enough copies to achieve profitability.

Another huge expense is updating the software frequently to add new features and to keep up to date with rapidly-changing technologies. For instance, several genealogy programs were written in programming languages using dBase or FoxPro databases, products that were dropped by their producers years ago. The genealogy programmers kept using the database technology as long as they could, but eventually problems crept in. The most common problem was compatibility with Windows. New releases of Windows might break or at least hamper the databases used in some genealogy programs.