<aside> 💡
This article is a reprint of that first published in the April 1999 issue of the monthly Family Tree Magazine
</aside>
"Atari, that's a games machine, isn't it?" is the usual response when I tell people that I keep all my family history records on my ever-aging Atari computer. While it is certainly true Atari Corporation first came to prominence with their arcade machines in the '70s, they also produced user-friendly and versatile home computers which people are still using today, even though the company itself no longer exists. As a result of its integral MIDI ports, it quickly became, and remains, a firm favorite with musicians and is still found sitting alongside the mixing desk in many recording studios. Its graphical interface was one of the precursors to Windows at a time when most PC users were still struggling with the complexities of DOS.
But what of family historians? How well have they been catered for in the Atari marketplace? Family Tree is a user-friendly genealogy program which was written by Ian and Mark Baker for their own family history and which uses the Atari's graphics environment to the full.
Unbelievably in these days of massive memory requirements and gigabytes of hard disk storage, Family Tree can be run on a 1MB machine with only a floppy disk drive, although a hard disk is preferable. Installation is very simple, since as the program can be run using floppy disks only, it can be loaded directly from the supplied disk. Most users, however, will want to install it on to their hard disk, which is a simple matter of dragging the files to a folder on your hard disk. On-line help is provided as an ST-Guide format hypertext and there is also a manual supplied in ASCII text format.
When the program starts you are presented with an alert box, or menu, from which you can start a new tree or load an existing one. Clicking on "NEW TREE" will present you with the file selector which has been initialized with the name Treedata. A further click on "OK" will create a folder where your data files will be stored. You can have a different file name for each folder. As is usual on the Atari, most of the program's functions are accessed via drop-down menus using the mouse, and no typing is required other than when entering information. The menus are File, Edit, Display, Custom, Print, Preferences and Help, and these then present you with options to perform operations like cut and paste or to open other windows.
Initial information is entered by clicking on New Person in the Display menu and you are then presented the Person Entry screen
Here you can enter names, place of birth, dates of birth, baptism, death and occupation. There are also fields which show parents, children, siblings and marriage details, but these are automatically filled in by the program and are for display purposes only. When entering a new person into the tree, there is an additional button labeled "Next." Clicking on this stores the data and clears the Person Entry form ready for another person.
Names and places of birth can contain any characters you can type, but dates have to be in the correct format. If you know the year but not the month or day, the program will still be able to sort people by date of birth. If you are not sure of the year, you can use "circa" which can be extremely useful. Marriages are used to cover any form of relationship which might produce children.
The authors state the concept of legitimacy has no place in their program, but there is space for 20 spouses! The marriage form allows space for ten children, although when this is full you can scroll down the list and enter up to forty children of a marriage in all. (The authors say they will allow for more if asked!)
Adding new children to a family is, again, a simple process. Clicking on one of the empty spaces in the Marriage form brings up the Person Selector form. If the father's family name has already been entered into the database, the Person Selector will already list this on the assumption that the child will be named after its father, and the rest of the family are automatically listed there too.
When subsequently viewing the child's Person form, you find the program has automatically entered parents and siblings correctly, and you can then enter further details. It is not possible to delete a marriage without first removing all of the children of that marriage, which seems tedious.
Flags, useful for selection, can be set to store information on, say, direct relations — there are eight definable fields. Editing is straightforward and it is easy to move around from one record to another with just a click of the mouse. From the Set Preferences menu, you can do automatic backups at timed intervals and also customize the way many of the functions of the program work.
Currently, Family Tree can import and export all data in GEDCOM format, except the custom designed flags, and I have never encountered any major problems moving information between Family Tree and programs on other platforms.
Ancestors and descendants can be displayed and printed as charts with each successive generation indented. However, it is the marvelous Custom trees that make this a "must have" program, although this function is only available with the GDOS or SpeedoGDOS graphics handling utility installed. To start a custom tree, you select NEW from the Custom menu and the Person Selector opens to allow you to choose the first person in your Custom tree. The program then opens a full-screen window with that person's name in a dashed-line box at the top left-hand corner. If their parents are included in the database, there will be a small box drawn at the center of the top of the box and, similarly, boxes appear for children and spouses. Clicking on any of these boxes will add their names, neatly entered relative to the original person. As you can then position them on the page, compiling drop-line charts with this program is even easier than drawing by hand, with much better printed results.
This example tree demonstrates the facility of using any mixture of fonts to produce trees which rank amongst the best computer generated ones I've seen.
It is perhaps the way that the display of trees is handled that, in my opinion, makes Family Tree more than a match for other currently available programs. Oh, and I've left the best bit until last: Family Tree is freeware!