Have you ever found yourself wondering whether you are related to a famous person, or what your ancestors got up to? Discovering your family's past can be fascinating and is a very popular hobby.

In finding out about your distant relatives, you can quickly build up a huge mass of information. But without some form of organisation, you can easily become bogged down or miss something important. Genealogy software helps you keep your notes and findings in order, leaving you to get on with the more exciting business of research and discovery.

That's not the end of the story, though. The genealogy software that we are looking at here can do far more than just cross-reference your family and record dates. Even the most fascinating histories can have new life breathed into them by the multimedia capability of genealogy software.

You can use it to organise photos and video of family members, and even sound files if you have old recordings that you can transfer to your computer.

So why settle for dry facts and figures? Let genealogy software help you build a sense of your family's history.

Getting started
The internet has become an indispensable resource with a huge number of historical and official documents available in electronic format.

Entire public records offices are at your disposal on the web, as well as online catalogues that tell you where to find the originals.

You can find plenty more media to add into your project than the contents of your own photo album. Websites like British Pathé have huge repositories of videos of events in history for sale at reasonable prices that you can use to give your multimedia projects context, especially if your forebears actually witnessed the event first hand.

You don't have to think big from the start, though. Genealogy software creates a database for your family information with all the awkward work already done and with forms to make entering the information as easy as possible.

Links with other family members are created automatically, along with other relevant information such as wedding and funeral dates and locations.

Legacy Family Tree Deluxe 4 £30
www.mindscape.co.uk
Legacy is easy for beginners to pick up but has plenty to offer when you scratch below the surface. A series of introductory videos is included on the disc to explain how to enter information. They last about 50 minutes but are well worth the time.

The emphasis is on adding relations rather than individuals, so you start with yourself and build the family tree up and down. This makes it harder to leave gaps in the information. For example, adding a spouse automatically takes you to the marriage information screen, where you can add further details.

Most of the reports are fairly dry, although you can include pictures in the Family Tree report and choose the background image or create name tags for family reunions. Serious researchers will appreciate the blank charts for collecting information.

A lot of modern day genealogy focuses on research using the internet but this isn't suitable for everyone. Some people simply don't want an internet connection, so Legacy has included CDs containing all the information to be found on two websites: Ancestry.com and MyTrees.com, both US-based sites but with a host of UK census information on each.

Legacy will help you create a website based on the information you have entered, although you'll have to arrange your own space on the internet with your ISP or a web-hosting company.

This is really handy if you want to share the results of your research with relatives that live far away or overseas. The web page can include pictures and there are four different ways of organising the information for others to view.

It's strengths are its ease of use and organisation but it could do with more multimedia capabilities.

Legacy Family Tree Foundations £10
www.mindscape.co.uk
For those wanting to start out without forking out more than a tenner, Legacy Family Tree Foundations offers the same capabilities as the Deluxe edition but without the research CDs. The same training video is included so beginners are not left to flounder.

You can search for individuals on the internet without closing the application, which is excellent for quickly checking records without having to remember a lot of website addresses. Legacy also includes the ability to use records from the Church of the Latter Day Saints but this can be turned off if you don't expect it to give any results. Some records relating to the UK are kept so it might be worth a try.

The date calculator is very useful for working out ages from dates or vice versa and the relationship calculator tells you the precise nature of your relationship with all those distant relatives. The reporting capabilities are no less comprehensive than the Deluxe version and you can create many different versions of family trees to tailor to your preferences.

If you are happy to do without the databases supplied on CD with the deluxe version and are prepared to do most of your research online, Legacy Family Tree Foundations is an excellent buy for beginners at just a third of the price of its bigger brother and offers the best value for money in our test.

Roots Magic £35
www.rootsmagic.com
Roots Magic combines easy data entry with a very wide selection of reports and projects. It crams large amounts of information on the screen without ever losing its clarity.

Multimedia handling is very impressive. You can add pictures, audio and video files to an individual's record, each with a caption and description. It is possible to attach any kind of file, which is very useful if you have a Word document that you want to attach.

The only small disadvantage is that the program used to create the file would be needed if you wanted to open your family tree elsewhere.

Roots Magic offers the most comprehensive printing options in the group test. It can create a book for you to print out, complete with index, with different chapters made up of the reports generated by Roots Magic.

The UK retailer S&N Genealogy Supplies offers a special UK edition of Roots Magic which comes with a searchable index of census results, a UK spell-check dictionary and a copy of Bartholomew's UK Atlas 1898, which has maps and statistics for England in the 19th century.

You can download a demo of Roots Magic from www.rootsmagic.co.uk to get a feel for the software. More experienced family historians will find Roots Magic's media-handling abilities impressive.

GSP Family Tree £50
www.gsp.cc
GSP Family Tree Genealogy Suite includes a total of seven CDs covering just about anything you'd want to do while putting a family tree together. The UKinfo 2003 Lite disc alone contains 44 million names and addresses in the UK, which will be really useful for tracking down living relatives you have lost touch with.

There is also plenty of help for newcomers to genealogy, such as a book that covers the basics of gathering and recording information, while one of the discs contains links to websites with information about their services and any costs.

Entering information is easy but some must be entered into separate windows, which are opened from the main window. This keeps the main window simple but can slow down data entry.