RootsMagic is a relative newcomer, but it comes packed with features that belie its age. If you don't have a lot of computer experience choosing a genealogy program can be very difficult. Obviously you want it to have all the features you need, but not so complex that it requires weeks of study—or even worse, you give up. This friendly program is intuitive and has good on-screen help, though if you are new to all of this it is worth paying the extra £10 for the well-written book by Bruce Buzbee, author of the software.

If your family data has already been stored in another program it can be exported as a GEDCOM file, the universal format for this type of information, and imported into RootsMagic.

Starting from scratch means a few hours hunched over the keyboard transferring information from your paper records, which is also a good time to enter sources for your data. A source is a note of where a particular piece of information came from and it can be rated from 'Primary' (eg - a birth certificate) to 'Unreliable' (Auntie Joan's memory). Double-clicking on a person's name within any of the three available views, Pedigree, Family or Descendants, brings up that person's information in a new window with a row of tabs across the top allowing you to choose the type of information you wish to add or alter. The Notes tab is the place to enter those snippets of information and family anecdotes that bring your history to life. There's even a 'To Do' tab where you can leave notes reminding yourself of loose ends and facts that need checking.

Multimedia is the term given to photographs, video and sound recordings. Unlike our ancestors, we have the change to pass not only pictures of ourselves, but also audio and video recordings stored as digital files. Each person and family in RootsMagic is assigned a scrapbook that can contain an unlimited number of multimedia items,. When photographs are added you can crop tem to the person of interest and adjust colour and brightness with the simple tools provided. A single line caption may be added to each item, though you can add longer notes in the picture's property box.

Once the facts and photographs have been entered the information can be presented in various types of reports and charts that you can taylor to your needs. You can select the fonts, margins, photographs and information to be included in the wide choice of standard reports, or, failing that, the program even allows you to design your own reports from scratch. Most Internet Service Providers give users several megabytes of space on the web and this can be used to increase the chances of finding others with interest in your family. Generating pages for the web used to be the domain of experts, but with RootsMagic, help is at hand. The software's wizard takes you through each stage checking what information to display, whether to hide living people, offering choices of styles and colours before finally enabling you to view the results on your normal web browser.

The comprehensive range of features in this program is not unique, but where it really scores is in bringing them together in a form that's easily accessible. This first release of the program lacks the facility to produce those large family tree diagrams that spread over several sheets of paper and it cannot export reports as PDF files. Expert genealogists may require a few more esoteric features found in other programs, but for many users this is the ideal program for recording your family history.