Free vs Paid Genealogy Tools: What Do You Really Need?

An honest guide to genealogy software and websites: what is free, what is worth paying for, and how to combine a desktop program, an online service and a printing tool.

Genealogy has a free tier and a paid tier, and a beginner is often not sure which parts of each they actually need. The good news is that the core of the hobby costs nothing, and the paid tools are worth paying for only at specific moments. Here is a map.

What is free and excellent

• FamilySearch: the largest free collection of records and images in the world, run by a non-profit. Registration is required, payment is not.
• National archives portals: most countries have digitised registers and censuses online for free.
• Volunteer indexes: Geneteka for Poland, FreeBMD and FreeREG for England, the many county and parish projects worldwide.
• Desktop programs: Gramps is free and open-source and handles GEDCOM well. Several commercial programs have free editions with the essential features.
• GEDCOM itself: the format is open; your data is never locked in.

What the subscriptions add

The commercial sites (Ancestry, MyHeritage, Findmypast, Geneanet Premium) sell three things:

1. Record collections that they indexed and that are not free elsewhere, especially newspapers, military records and some national censuses.
2. Hints that match your tree to their records and to other trees automatically.
3. DNA matching to other customers.

A common and sensible pattern is to subscribe for one or two months, work intensively, download the records and the GEDCOM, and cancel. Repeat once a year.

What is worth paying for once

• A good scanner for photographs and documents.
• A desktop program if you prefer one; it is a one-time purchase and keeps working without a subscription.
• Archive copies of records not yet online.
• Printing: a large chart or a bound book costs money at the print shop, and it is the most visible result of your work.

What you do not need

• More than one online tree. Keep one master and treat the rest as copies.
• Every DNA test on the market. One autosomal test, uploaded to the sites that accept transfers, covers most needs.
• A subscription you are not actively using. Data you downloaded stays yours.

A workable setup

1. A master tree in a desktop program or one online service.
2. A regular GEDCOM export kept with your backups.
3. Free archives and FamilySearch for the records, with an occasional month of a commercial subscription.
4. A printing tool such as PrintFamilyTree when you want a chart for the wall or a book for the shelf, paid only when you actually print.

The hobby rewards patience far more than spending. The families with the best trees are the ones that spend their money on archive visits and print copies for the relatives, not on a dozen overlapping subscriptions.