Family Tree SuperTools

Wish your family tree computer program could get more advanced as your software skills do? A new add-on developed by Wholly Genes, makers of The Master Genealogist, can help you do more with your data&#151without actually switching programs.

Family Tree SuperTools provides enhanced tools for charting, file management and searching. A companion to your main genealogy software, it conveniently reads the data you’ve already entered using Family Tree Maker, Personal Ancestral File or other popular programs, so you don’t have to re-enter your data or create a GEDCOM file.

This utility has several useful tools to complement the program you already use:

1. Professional wall charts&#151Most genealogy programs produce wall charts, but SuperTools offers exceptional flexibility in designing ancestor, descendant, hourglass and fan charts. It adds nice variations on the standard charts, especially a 10-generation fan chart that fits on just 12 sheets of paper.

Like other genealogy software, SuperTools can print your completed chart on multiple sheets of letter-size paper for you to piece together. But SuperTools also makes it easy to have your chart printed on one large sheet of paper for a much nicer look. Simply submit your file over the Web to Wholly Genes’ printing service. They’ll print it on a single sheet of heavyweight paper using a professional large-format color printer and send it to you in a mailing tube. These attractive charts make ideal gifts or exhibits for a family reunion; prices start at $19.95.

2. Powerful file viewing&#151SuperTools lets you open multiple views of the same data file at one time. You can also view and search data from multiple sources, such as GEDCOM files from other researchers or downloaded from the Internet, and compare it to your own data without merging the files.

3. Efficient Web searching&#151Select one or more people in your file and SuperTools automatically searches for each name on five major genealogy sites: FamilySearch www.familysearch.org, Ancestry Ancestry.com , RootsWeb www.rootsweb. com, Gendex www.gendex.com and Genealogy Portal www.genealogyportal.com.

You can use SuperTools on a 166MHz or faster PC with Windows 95 or higher. Although it requires more hard disk space (51MB) and memory (64MB) than most full-featured genealogy software, response was still slow when editing a 10-generation fan chart on a computer with 192MB RAM. For good performance you’ll want much more than 64MB of memory to edit charts with a lot of names. Note, too, that a picture-heavy chart can take up 40MB or more of disk space, and you may need 200MB or more of free hard disk space to hold temporary files created while the chart is printing.

Add in other features such as multimedia slide shows, historical timelines and relationship and date calculators, and Family Tree SuperTools version 1.1 is an excellent buy. It costs $17.95 to download from www.whollygenes.com or $19.95 plus shipping on CD-ROM. (Be advised: SuperTools is a large file, so it could take a long time to download with a dial-up Internet connection.) For more information, contact Wholly Genes at (877) 864-3264.