Suggestions for Persons New to Researching Their Family

If you want genealogy help organizing your family data we recommend the genealogy computer program and the genealogy books on this page.

RootsMagic

If you only buy only one thing to help you with researching and recording what you find about your family — buy the RootsMagic computer program.

At the Joseph Bucklin Society, we have tried many genealogy computer programs throughout 30 plus years of using computers for genealogical research and preservation of data. RootsMagic is a “best choice”.

  • RootsMagic is easy to understand and use.
  • RootsMagic is the easiest way to record your information. as you find it. RootsMagic will let you input all sorts and amounts of data. Even photos and documents can be “attached” to a persons.
  • RootsMagic will organize (and display) your family history from your bits of information.
  • RootsMagic is powerful, able to grow with you, even through years of research and even if you enter hundreds of persons and thousands of facts about them.

Awarded “Editor’s Choice” by Heritage Quest Magazine. RootsMagic is an easy to use family tree program with extensive family history reports, multiple navigation views, photos, publishing, and website creation features. RootsMagic supports unlimited people, families, events, notes, and photos. Users can print complete books (where the program writes the sentences for each event), spectacular charts, forms, lists, and even create custom reports. Create shareable CDs of your data and photos to send to your family and friends. Buy at Amazon

The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Genealogy, the Internet, and Your Genealogy Computer Program

by Karen Clifford

Karen Clifford is a renowned professional genealogist and instructor on genealogy research. Her guidebook is This is a manual to show you how to get started in your family history research, how to enter information into a genealogy computer program so that you can easily manage, store, and retrieve your data; and how to organize and present your information for others. This book contains guidelines for using public libraries and archives, and is the most complete of the many guides. (Despite its subtitle, it is not a guide for using the internet, unless you are a novice on using your own computer.) Buy at Amazon

Genealogy Online

by Elizabeth Crowe

Books about using the internet become dated quickly, but Crowe’s book is very recent and is written so that it should stand the test of being able to be used for a decade. This is written for beginners using the internet for genealogy research, but even experienced researchers will benefit from some of Crowe’s lists of internet resources. Buy at Amazon