Useful Programs

Free Genealogy Programs

• Legacy Family Tree - Legacy is a genealogy management program designed to help you organise your family history research.  The stardard edition is free and has more limited features than the deluxe version available to purchase.  But even the free version has lots of features and produces some nice reports including the ability to make ancestral books and websites easily.
• Personal Ancestral File - PAF is another genealogy management program, provided free by the Mormon LDS designed to help you to organise your family history records.  It can produce pedigree charts, family group sheets, family history reports, amongst others.
• UK Parish Locator - This is a very useful freeware program enabling you to locate over 15,000 UK parishes.  It can find the distance between any two specified parishes, provide a list of parishes within any given radius of a parish and even plot the location of parishes, either on screen or for you to print out.
• England & Wales 1901 Census Decoder - The 1901 Census Decoder is a program designed to help you search the UK's 1901 Census site.  Search results can be transferred to the decoder, enabling you to sort and group the data into probable family groups.

Other Useful Free Programs

Essential PIM is a personal information manager that can help you schedule your day, manage your contacts, keep track of 'To Do Lists' and organise your notes.  (See full-features list)   It has a host of uses for organising your personal life, but could also be used to store notes and reminders for your genealogy research.  If you have seen Microsoft's Outlook, then this is very similar... without the email facilities. The basic version is free, although there is a Pro-Version available to purchase.

IrfanView is a free graphics viewer for Windows platforms.  It is also a graphics editor with lots of other features including the ability to resize graphics and add effects to them.

Open Office.org is a free multi-platform office productivity suite comprising a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager and drawing manager.  It is free to download and use.

Paint.NET is an image and photo manipulation software that supports layers, special effects, unlimited undo and a wide variety of other useful tools.  This is free to download and use, but please check the System Requirements page before downloading as this is designed to run on Windows 2000, XP, Vista or Server 2003.  So it is not a multi-platform application.