Hot from S&N Genealogy Supplies comes RootsMagic version 4 (RM4). It's a lineage-linked family history software database program, developed by the American publisher RootsMagic Inc, from whom you can also buy an American version. You're better off with S&N's offering though because it's been anglicised using a proper (UK) English dictionary, and it also adds S&N to its list of web search pages.
S&N offers RM4 in two bundles, Standard at £37.45 and Platinum (reviewed here) at £52.45. There is also a program-only single-disc Basic for £27.45 on CD or £22.95 by download; and a single-disc Upgrade to RM4 at £22.45 on CD or £18.40 by download. The program is the same in each case, only the extras differ.
In the Standard version these extras are Bartholomew's 1898 Royal Atlas of England and Wales on CD, including some street maps and an index; plus £1,620-worth of vouchers for further data sets from British Data Archive. Platinum adds a few more data CDs that may or may not be relevant to your researches and a subscription to UK BMD and census pages at www.thegenealogist.co.uk. You can download RM4 from www.rootsmagic.co.uk.
RM4 offers plenty of new features, some bringing it level with its competitors and some enabling it to leapfrog them. There are now five tabbed views: Pedigree; Family; Descendants; People (a list); and WebSearch; and you can choose which is to be the default on opening.
Pedigree view displays five or six generations at once, while Descendant view lets you choose from two to seven generations at once. Data entry - people and events - is via an edit screen, where you can also add facts - occupations, residences, religion - with notes and information sources for each. There's a range of source templates or you can design your own.
You can choose from 66 pre-entered facts and events or add your own. You can add a 'proof' value to the fact or relationship to indicate how much it can be trusted. You can also share sources between people or events. RM4 will be able to handle the new LDS FamilySearch when it becomes generally available, and there's already an edit screen for LDS ordinances.
The new sidebar can cycle through lists of family names, bookmarks, recently viewed people, grouped people, and an index. You can refine place details with a field for the name of a church, cemetary, hospital, or street address, like the Description field in the Legacy software. And as in The Master Genealogist software, you can include other people in an event - witness, minister, boarder, servant. Text in notes can be formatted for style and you can add photos on-screen and to some reports. The new Gazetteer shows matches for full or partial place names entered, and the Mapping feature displays a map of places from Microsoft's Virtual Earth.
In narrative reports, fact fields are assembled into proper sentences, which you can edit or replace using a combination of plain text and built-in fields as in Legacy or The Master Genealogist. You can assemble a 'book' created from selected reports (including graphical pages) plus contents and name and place index pages, with place keepers for any already printed pages. Reports can be printed, previewed or emailed. There's a range of wall charts and paginated charts (to fit A4 paper), some with colour. Text reports can be printed or exported to your word processor in RTF, or to Adobe's PDF. Charts can be exported in graphic formats.
RM4 can transfer your data to a shareable CD, complete with a read-only copy of RootsMagic to give to others. It can also generate six types of web pages to upload, with photos, notes, sources, index, surname list, and a GEDCOM file. Unlike some software, you are not tied to the publisher's web space but can upload to any web space available to you.
The most unexpected new feature, unique to RM4, is RootsMagic To-Go, which installs a fully-working copy of RootsMagic plus your data onto a removable drive, which can be a CD, USB drive or memory stick. You can then take this anywhere with you to run on any computer, even if it doesn't have RM installed. This is almost as useful as having your family tree on a PDA, although RM4 To-Go does of course need another computer on which to run.
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