COMPANY: S&N Genealogy	PRICE: £35 inc VAT
RATING:	ISSUE: 198  DATE: Aug 04

To start from scratch in RootsMagic you click on the Add person icon, which requires minimal information: given names, surname and gender, dates and places of birth, death and burial. This in turn opens the Edit Person dialog box, where you can add more data.

The Source Wizard helps you to add notes and source citations and even multimedia for every piece of information. The program makes it easy to add parents, children and spouses. It automatically replicates surnames where appropriate and auto-completes place names.

The other two main screens, Family View and Descendants View, can be accessed easily by clicking on their tabs. The Search icon in the toolbar opens the Explorer, which allows you to quickly find any person in your database.

RootsMagic has good presentation facilities. It can print pedigree charts, family group sheets and narrative reports, and can also automatically generate a website with this content. It includes timeline and relationship charts and produces photo charts. It also lets you print calendars of the birthdays and wedding anniversaries of living family members with their ages and the year in which they were married. Additional tools include a relationship calculator and a merge facility for duplicate records. Although it uses a proprietary file format it can import and export GEDCOM files.

The UK edition of RootsMagic includes a searchable index to a number of 19th-century censuses and other S&N Genealogy CDs. It also has Bartholomew's UK Atlas 1898, which includes an index of places in England and Wales and street maps of places that no longer exist

By Sue Gee