Mediaboss Marketing

By Molly McLaughlin

For budding genealogists, using a free program is a great wayto get your feet wet. Mocavo offers a generous free plan (Mocavo Basic) that includes access to thousands of integrated public records. Itspaid plans, Mocavo Silver ($7 per month) and Mocavo Gold ($9 per month), offer a free seven-day trial and a few extras to simplify your research process. In general, Mocavooffers a fun, simple interface and a good feature set, even with the free plan. The only thing missing is a publishing option. Despite some shortcomings, Mocavo is our Editors' Choice for free genealogy software.

Setup and InterfaceTo get a good sense of the service, I signed up for a free trial of Mocavo Gold, which offers a central database for conducting your research, email alerts about possible ancestors, and live webcasts with their chief genealogist. Only Mocavo Gold members can export their family tree as a GEDCOM file, though. After the trial, which requires a credit card, you can pay month to month or annually, for a discounted price ($80 for Silver, $100 for Gold).

When you sign in for the first time, a windowopens that asks if you want to perform a surname search on up to three names. If you do, you're automatically signed up with surname groups. In those groups, you can see all the data related to thesurnames from a range of sources, including the social security death index, state death records, census records, court, land and tax records, family and personal histories, immigration and travel, and more.

Mocavo'sinterface is well designed, and I like its light tone when it comes to communications, alerts, and other content on the site. For example, when I connected my account with Facebook, a message appeared that said, "Double-check your relationships to the people below before we add them to your family tree. We understand that some friends are 'basically sisters,' but let's keep it genealogical here."

Building Family TreesAs is par for the genealogy course, you can create your family tree from scratch or upload a GEDCOM file, but in Mocavo,you can also connect to your Facebook profile. It only works if you've added the Family Members feature to your profile, however. I uploaded a small GEDCOM file (about 3KB) from OneGreatFamily, and it was accurately processed in about a minute.

You can add a photo to relative's profiles in addition to life events and notes. After I added one of my relatives, I accidentally hit the save button a few times and ended up create multiple entries. To fix it, I had to delete the duplicates one by one, which was annoying since I couldn't think of a reason anyone would want to create duplicate entries in the first place.

Public records are free no matter the plan. When you find a matching record, you can attach it to aspecific family member, save it in your shoebox (avirtual catchall for info you want to save, but you're not sure where it goes), or hide it forever if it's not relevant. Next time you search, any results that you've connected to a family member are marked as such, so you don't do double work. I love that the research is integrated so you don't have to copy and paste which can lead to errors. Mocavo shares this excellent feature with the PCMag Editors' Choice award-winning Ancestry and Arviches.

Your family tree can be dragged all around the page, so you can easily access specific family members. You'll appreciate this functionif you need to add children to a relative near the bottom of the page, as the drop-down menu may get cut off. It took me a few minutes to get the hang of it, but it was generally easy to use and responsive.

There aren't any formal publishing options. You can print blank trees, diagrams and charts, but if you want to create anything fancy, you'll have to go elsewhere. There is an option to edit the blank PDFs, but that's just double work.

See original here:
Mocavo