Into the Woods

Do you have presidents, patriots, nobles or notables in your family tree? Find out with the American & European Family Forest Odyssey Edition. Like previous versions of Millisecond Publishing’s Family Forest products, this CD-ROM takes information extracted from historical, genealogical and biographical reference books and weaves it into a lineage-linked database. The Odyssey edition adds new data and combines the five earlier versions on a single disc.

Family Forest uses Progeny Software’s Family Explorer, an easy-to-use viewer that lets you see the descendants and ancestors of every person in the database. You can click on any person and get a variety of charts, including an hourglass chart that’s new to this version.

To help you navigate the database’s depth of details, the CD comes with a 10-minute introductory tour. It starts by viewing the details of Edward Dean Adams, who “negotiated a gold deal to avert a US financial crisis.” The tour instructs you to view Adams’ descendant chart, where you click on one of his greatgrandchildren, Judith Adams. From there, you click on a series of other people, taking you back and forth through 1,200 years of ancestral history — from King Alfred the Great of England to Mary Queen of Scots to George Washington, all of whom are connected through marriage or blood.

The CD serves as an index of hundreds of sources on royalty, presidents and prominent families, such as Sir George Bellew’s Britain’s Kings And Queens, 63 reigns in 1100 years; Joseph Nathan Kane’s Facts About the Presidents: A Compilation of Biographical and Historical Data, sixth edition; and Rockefellers: An American Dynasty by Peter Collier and David Horowitz.

Even if you don’t discover that you’re related to someone famous, Family Forest Odyssey Edition can lead you to helpful books you might not otherwise know to buy, rent or borrow. It’s also a useful research aid to learn about your ancestors’ contemporaries: If you need to know where a president was born or check the names of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, this CD can give you the answer in a flash.

Family Forest Odyssey Edition requires a Pentium-speed processor, Windows 95 or higher and 4MB hard disk space. Order for $53.95 at <www.familyforest.com> or (888) 638-0333.

From the February 2002 issue of Family Tree Magazine