Brother's Keeper 6.3

James Taylor reviews one of the original family history programs

Brother's Keeper (BK), one of the oldest family history programs available, looks as fresh now as ever - a polite way of saying its interface is not among the most modern. It is, in fact exceddingly plain and colour-free, but it does provide access to important tools needed by any family history enthusiast.

The starting screen has a welcome message and menu items for file, edit, descendant, ancestor, lists, other and help (the only time you'll see help on the menu). The editing screen is where most of the work is done, with tabs available (for a pre-selected person) for Events/Facts, Children, Notes, Pictures (you can attach 100 pictures to each person or to a husband and wife), Media, Address, Names, Siblings, and To Do. You can choose from about 90 events/facts, each of which can have notes, sources, or witnesses attached.

Sources can be specific or - if you have a source for that person that doesn't apply to just one event - you can assign a general source. Similarly, you can add a general source for the whole family. You can also indicate whether children are of natural birth, adopted, fostered, a stepchild or 'other'. If the parents aren't the natural birth parents, then the words Father and Mother will be in italics on the Edit screen. There seems to be no way of accommodating same-sex partnerships.

You can navigate through your file from this screen, one person at a time, by clicking an individual's father, mother, spouse, or children. You can also search for people by name or number, although you will have to type this in manually - none of that new-fangled indexed pick-list here.

You can also display or print a variety of reports and charts. Descendants can be shown on tree (waterfall) or box (drop-line) cahrts, as well as in listings. Ancestor reports also embrace charts and lists, while the seperate 'Lists' reports include things like birthdays and anniversaries, missing information, locations and sources.

You can also produce various statistics relating to your tree. There's a 'book' report which generates a narrative report, though you should note that this is not a book report like that in, say, RootsMagic or the old Family Tree Maker, which allow you to add other native or external material. Reports are perfectly fine for your own records but just miss being suitable for public circulation. You can send reports to your word processor instead of polishing, an option also provided by some other software such as The Master Genealogist.

Other reports include a birth date calculator, working from death date and age at death; a birthday and/or anniversay list of all selected people; a descendant count (but no names); a report showing which children came from which marriages; and graphic bar charts showing the lifespan of people (age at death) or the number of children per family. There's also a timeline (birth, marriage and death dates) for a selected individual, which can start with their grandparents and end with any great-grandchildren. This does, however, print a line for every year, which can waste a lot of paper.

Navigating through BK is not as easy as most of its competitors but it is an ideal program for those new to genealogy. You may have to be sufficiently familiar with computing to take advantage of the help available from the program's own system, as well as obtain support from the program's author and forum. The program is available in several languages (not UK English), and is under continuous development with a seemingly never-ending flow of minor upgrades available online. In addition, John Steed, the program's author, responds promptly and personally to your queries and there's also a thriving user's forum, albeit mostly frequented by the same hard-core clique, where you can have your hand held.

BK is a shareware product. After you've downloaded (from www.bkwin.com) and tried a copy, you need to send the registration fee to the author of the program (although nothing drastic is threatened if you don't). Registration costs $45 (approx £40) for the full version including a printed manual.

In return, you get latest version, a printed manual and entitlement to technical support. You will also receive a password with which you can access extra features. Currently this includes the ability to create RTF (Rich Text Format) reports of the book style reports; to do a soundex search in Word Search; to print a six generation ancestor chart; to print pictures of the children on the Group sheets; to print a single page from the Preview screen; and the ability to print or display a Picture Summary.

Reproduced from a review by James Taylor in Family History Monthly