Kith & Kin Pro

                 Reviewed by Julian Gregory

Genealogy has become one of the most popular pastimes in recent
years. You only have to have experienced the scrum at Catherine's
House to appreciate this.

In the BC days (before computers) genealogists kept cards with the
details of each person and transferred the names onto paper family
trees. These could get quite awkward, particularly if there a
large number of children of a particular marriage. The effort
involved in rewriting a tree must have put some researchers off
the hobby for good.  Fortunately a computer was an ideal tool to
use to record and print out whatever charts were required.

The basic idea of a genealogy package is so that you can record
the principle events in a person's life; birth, christening,
marriage, death and burial. The program will then have the data to
produce various types of chart for display purposes.

I have tried a number of genealogy packages and was delighted to
be asked to review Kith & Kin Pro. It was a package I had read
something about, but knew nothing else about. The version I tried
was the shareware one, which gives you 30 days to try and see if
you like it before you buy.

Kith & Kin comes on a CD which I inserted and attempted to find my
way around it intuitively. I have found that with most good
programs it should possible to jump straight into them.  Kith &
Kin is not one of these. This is partly because of the way entries
are entered and partly because of the sheer complexity of the
program. There is a tutorial included and I recommend that this
should be the first thing you look at. The full version has an
interactive tutorial included, but I have not seen this.

Each family tree is stored in a relational database with a
capacity of over 2 million records. You can have as many databases
as you want.

Most genealogy packages are mainly text based but Kith & Kin uses
the main area of the screen as a window which displays each family
as a rectangle. Children are shown at the bottom of the rectangle,
either blue or pink. Related families are connected by link lines
and it is possible to move them around to form any tree layout
required. If you double-click on a family rectangle you can gain
direct access to the family. You can also zoom in or out of the
tree. I suspect that this idea seemed original at the time the
program was being written, but as far as I am concerned it did not
serve its purpose of making it easy to navigate through the
various families.

The basic details entered for each individual include all the
usual birth, baptism, marriage and death dates. In addition it is
possible to add extras fields and you can add pictures and OLE
objects.

Inevitably there can be quite a lot of duplicate typing in such
programs, such as the same surnames. Kith & Kin has a useful
option where if you right-click the mouse on a field, you are
given a choice between the entries you have already made in that
field. This can save much boring repetition and is a good time
saver.

Each person or family can also have multiple notes. Each note can
be given a privacy level which decides whether or not the notes
are printed. There are many different forms which can be printed
and many options to control how the printout will look. For
example the margins can be set as inches or millimetres,
presumably depending on how old you are! The paper can be set to
portrait or landscape depending on the size and shape of the
printout you want. It is also possible to print to the screen, so
that a preview of what will be printed can be seen to ensure that
it is what is required.  A very helpful facility is the detailed
entries which can be made to record the source of the information
entered.

My first impressions are that it seems to be well written, but
there does seem to be a large number of facilities which strike me
as largely irrelevant.

There is the usual file transfer process (GEDCOM) to import and
export data to other programs, although I have not tried this to
see how well it works.

As well as the data entry facilities there is a useful option to
search for duplicate entries. This is more important if you merge
records on a regular basis.

If you like it enough to buy the program it will cost you œ33 for
the latest registered version, a timeline file with British
history from 800AD to the present day, some international
timelines, the interactive tutorials and telephone support.






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