Ancestry and family tree apps

With all the focus on family this holiday season, many experts say it’s also important to focus on our family trees for various reasons, including health.

With the right genealogy app, it can be relatively easy to, well, find out more about our relatives, as PC Mike Wendland reports.

The Ancestry app draws information from more than 14 billion historical photos and records to help you track down info about relatives. Information for family trees can be edited within the app, as well as shared with others, which means you can collaborate with other family members to flush out details. The app is free for iOS, Android, and Amazon though a subscription is required for most useful features.

FamilySearch Tree helps discover and document your own branches of the world’s family tree while preserving family memories such as photos, written stories, and audio recordings. Family trees are shared amongst those who are connected, and edits are updated in real-time so relatives can collaborate, no matter how far removed they may be. FamilySearch Tree is free for iOS and Android.

The RootsMagic app is designed to work with a desktop version of RootsMagic, which allows for researching, organizing and sharing family history. Files can be stored in the cloud, making them readily available. Information can be sorted based on family, descendants and surname . The app is free for iOS, Android, and Amazon.