This one is for all you amateur and aspiring genealogists groovyReaders out there fascinated by dead people. Granted I have to admit, I’m neither yet the first time I loaded this Free Family Tree Mapping Application, 10 minutes turned into 3 hours!!!
What am I talking about? Well, a few years ago I stumbled across a free application called Family.Show by Vertigo Software. Although a bit buggy with it’s first few releases, the latest release has proven to be just as addictive as the first release yet much more stable and includes many of the earlier missing features. Again I repeat – Family.Show is a solid time vacuum. You can easily sit down at your computer thinking to spend just a few minutes and before you know it, 3-4 hours have passed! The fluid, simple and beautiful interface really is a thing of beauty!
Ready to take a look? Here’s a quick preview:
Installing Family.Show is very simple. Simply visit the download page http://www.vertigo.com/familyshow.aspx and Click the Family.Show V3 Install Link
I tested the One-Click-Install using Windows Vista and Windows 7. If you have issues, you might need to install the Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5, found here - Download Link
Once the install is completed, the launch window gives you simple options. First time users will want to start out with New which will let you start building a family tree from scratch.
Later, you can also share your saved Family.Show tree emailing it to family members to help finish it off or, use the Import/Export functions for use with GedCom compatible files (hardcore genealogists when when I’m talking about there I’m sure). The Export Function doesn’t appear on the launch page but you’ll be able to access it later under GEDCOM from the menu.
Getting back to Family.Show, building a family tree starts with first creating your initial person, in most cases yourself. From there you can add more relatives by using the drop-menu under Create Relationship – Add Father, Add Mother, Brother, Sister etc…. If you accidently enter the wrong information for a particular family member you can always come back later and adjust their details such as birth date, birth place, date of death etc… The program is VERY visual as you will notice from the very beginning. It’s so intuitive you should be up and running with little to no learning curve.
For additional features, Click the Details Button to add even more data, or Click the Photos and Stories 
Button to add Photos and Stories for each of your family members. You can also Click the Expand button to get a complete list of all your Individual Family Members, Mass Edit their data, view the Name Cloud of Last Names and Click on them to filter, view Age Distributions and even birthdays! Are are clickable and act as a filter.
If anyone creates any interesting Family Tree’s don’t hesitate to share them! Would love to hear about and see the trees of you groovyReaders as I’m sure your going to waste as much time have as much fun as I did creating my groovyFamily Tree! 
Questions, Comments? Drop a comment below, or Join us in our Free Technical Support Community Forum by creating a new Discussion Topic!
HI, nit very nice, however, I failed to notice in the software, print button and the export is not in any familiar extensions ie PDF, word or even JEPG. How the files can be exported to these formats and printed, please explain.
HI Masood,
Yeah, that's one of the downsides of the application. There isn't a Print feature. That being said, on my Windows 7 box, I was able to Click Save -> Save to XPS.
XPS is the new Microsoft PDF format. More info on that here:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/xpsusers.mspx
I think XPS is built into Windows 7 and Vista so hopefully you can open it and print it.