Features
At a minimum, genealogy software collects the date and place of an individual's birth, marriage, and death, and stores the relationships of individuals to their parents, spouses, and children. Some programs are more flexible than others in allowing for the input of children born out of wedlock or for varying types of spousal relationships. Additionally, most genealogy programs handle additional events in an individual's life, notes, photographs and multimedia, and source citations. Genealogy software programs can produce a variety of graphical charts and text reports, such as pedigree charts, ahnentafel reports, and Register reports. Some desktop applications generate HTML pages for web publishing; there are stand-alone web applications, as well. Most genealogy programs can import and export using the GEDCOM standard.
Some programs include additional fields relevant to particular religions. Others focus on certain geographical regions. For example, having a field for the family's coat of arms is only relevant if the family comes from a part of the world that uses them.
While most programs and applications are desktop-based, there are a number of web-based products in the genealogy software market.
Many genealogy applications focus on data management in that they allow users to manage all the information they collect on individuals, families, and events. Other tools available to the genealogist include research management tools, mapping tools, charting programs, and web-publishing programs.
Read more about this topic: Genealogy Software
Famous quotes containing the word features:
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)