Your family tree findings are spilling out of their shoebox, and the manila folder marked “Genealogy” is splitting at the seams. Your hand-drawn pedigree charts look as if they were sketched by angry chickens. It's time to upgrade from old-fashioned paper to high-tech genealogy software, and turn your family history into bits, bytes and pixels.

But how to begin? If you think GEDCOM sounds more like a cellphone company or Pentagon command than a family tree file type, or if you'd guess that PDF stands for Pretty Darn Fine instead of Portable Document Format, you may not feel ready to leap into the brave new world of digital family history. Never fear: Just as you mastered genealogy Web sites and found your way from Cyndi's List <www.cyndislist.com> to GenForum <genforum.genealogy.com>, you can figure out what you need to know to buy the right genealogy software and start inputting your research results.