Software Review
Family Forest Odyssey Edition
by George G. Morgan
Council of Genealogy Columnists
www.ancestry.com

Millisecond Publishing Company, Inc., has just released its latest "Family Forest" CD-ROM and it's a fascinating product. The "Family Forest Odyssey Edition," produces a lineage-linked view of history and personages. It can be used by genealogists, and also as a valuable resource for teaching history in the classroom or as a reference resource in a library.

There are literally thousands of individuals included in an integrated, searchable database. You may use names, ID numbers assigned to each person, and/or keywords to produce custom results lists. The results may surprise you as you can sometimes trace a lineage back through royal houses and the like to ancient Rome or down through the 1990s. You do so through searches and then clicking ad infinitum, it seems, through the charts displayed. If you are interested in tracing President George Washington's lineage, for instance, you will find his wife, his siblings, his parents and other antecedents--and appropriate source citations--well documented.

You can view ancestors, descendants, family groups, and move up and down the family, as well as produce charts in a wealth of customizable detail, including hundreds of five-mile high charts, all of which can be displayed on-screen or printed.

The folks at Millisecond say that the "Family Forest" is a "people-centered approach to history" and that it is. It is a growing project that provides an engaging approach to studying history and its participants. As a genealogist, you will find many, many detailed and documented links from our U.S. ancestors back to and through Europe; as a historian, you will find this cross-linked "Family Forest" a terrifically interesting trip through history and the lives of many people who influenced it. It's a very enjoyable and informative piece of software.

Happy Hunting!