Access your ancestry tree offline – for free

My name is Mandy Geary, and I’m a professional genealogist based in Essex. Similarly to Claire Bradley in her review of RootsMagic10 (see FT August), I have to confess I’m not a regular user of any of

I was going to start this month’s article by talking about why we love this hobby so much but I realised that this isn’t really a hobby at all. Genealogy/family tree research/ancestor hunting or whate

Most of us have unfortunate brick walls in our family trees – those frustrating relations who seem to have appeared into the world as if from nowhere. Perhaps a person does not feature in the baptism

Like many people starting out in their family history research I kept my personal tree on paper and then added it to one of the family history websites. I soon realised that I also wanted a program wh

Picture this: you have followed that advice, spending countless hours building your family tree, squinting at faded census records and wrestling with handwriting that makes doctors’ prescriptions look

There’s nothing more frustrating than finding yourself at a dead end when researching an ancestor. Often, it’s not because you’ve exhausted all possibilities, but rather because you’ve not realised wh