MAC Genealogy Software

I've got a few people in my ward that have Macs rather than Windows computers.  The PAF program from the Church only works on Windows.  So, I get the question: What can I use on the Mac?

I tell them that I run bootcamp or a virtual machine with Windows and PAF runs just fine on my Mac.  That answer doesn't help them as most of them don't know or want to do things that way.

Today, I decided to try out a few of the genealogy programs that run on the Mac.

GenealogyJ

The first one that I tried was GenealogyJ.  The price is right -- it's free.  It's open source.  It is a Java program and appears to run on any platform with the latest Java runtime.

I did not like it.

Reunion 9

I then tried Reunion which is currently at version 9.  They have a demo version.  The demo did not allow me to load a GEDCOM, so I had to enter my data to test out the program.  A test data file is also available, but I wanted to see what my own data looks like in the program.

The main window displays a couple with their children and both the parents of the husband and the wife.  I like that the program had support for LDS ordinances.  The overall look and feel was Mac-like and appeared to me to be quite intuitive.

MacFamilyTree

The MacFamilyTree also has a Mac-like look and feel, but it did not appear as intuitive as Reunion 9.  I was able to load my own GEDCOM, but when I entered a date, it did not normalize the date -- it accepted and kept the date exactly as I had typed it.

iFamily

This software appears to take advantage of many of the latest Mac features.  While I found the LDS Events, I could not find a place to record the temple nor a place to record BIC.

It has a 10 day trial period.

GEDitCOM

This is a nice utility that allows the user to work with a GEDCOM file.  I would not recommend it for a typical user.