RootsMate was the only brand-new, full-featured genealogy product
announced at the 2002 NGS conference. RootsMate is produced by FormalSoft, a
small company owned by Bruce Buzbee. Bruce is well known in the genealogy community
as the mastermind behind Family Origins, a very popular genealogy program originally
sold by Parsons Technology, which was acquired some time ago by Genealogy.com.
Genealogy.com promoted Family Origins for a short while but apparently stopped
advertising it more than a year ago. The Genealogy.com website today heavily
advertises Family Tree Maker but makes no mention of Family Origins. The Genealogy.com
booth at this year’s conference also made no mention of the program. I
don’t remember the last time I saw any press releases or advertisements
from Genealogy.com about Family Origins. Bruce apparently is breaking away from
the Genealogy.com "umbrella" and is developing a new full-featured
genealogy program to be called RootsMate. This new program is all new; it doesn’t
share any code with Family Origins.
RootsMate appears to have all the features of most of today’s
well-known genealogy programs. When I referred to it as being in beta, Bruce
corrected me and said it is still alpha code. Not all of the functionality has
been coded yet. Once he is happy with it, he will turn it over to a group of
beta testers to find the bugs, if any. RootsMate will not be available for purchase
until later this year. He promised to deliver an early copy to me once the program
is ready, so I hope to write about it in this newsletter at that time. If you
would like to know more about RootsMate when it nears its delivery date, you
can sign up for an announcement mailing list at www.rootsmate.com.
Dick Eastman Online
