Best Genealogy search program?

Question:Hi there are a lot of genealogy search programs on the net. Whats the best one?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Hi there are a lot of genealogy search programs on the net. Whats the best one?

Family Tree Maker and Roots Magic are both popular, well-crafted genealogy programs. Both have utilities that will suggest places to look. As far as I know there isn't a program that will search the 400,000+ genealogy sites on the Internet for you.

The ideal genealogy search program would look at your data, then hum to itself all night and give you a list of sites that had the same people you did, based on name, birth date, spouse's name and so forth. Is that what you meant? If so, and you have seen a lot, would you post links to some of them?

GenCircles
http://www.gencircles.com/
will match your individuals with other similar individuals on databases from other genealogists, but it just looks at the GEDCOMs people have uploaded to GenCircles, not the whole Internet.

Researching your family history online can be a long and tedious process. I did my own family history search a few years back and was able to get back to 1680 eventually. It took me the better part of a year to do that though. The sites I used primarily were ancestry.com and genealogy.com. Before you begin an online search, I'd advise you to gather as much information about your family as you can from your own personal knowledge or by probing the memories of your eldest living relatives. First.. because it's good to be able to have that material to cross-reference as you search and it can help you to determine if information you've found online actually pertains to your branch of the family or some more distant branch.. and second... the knowledge you gain from your relatives will be of a much more personal nature than you will find online. My most prized posession of all the material I collected during my research, was a 21 page letter I got in response from an elderly cousin who also just happened to be with my grandfather on the day he was killed during world war two. That man passed away just this past spring. If I hadn't contacted him when I did.. I would never gotten such a personal first hand experience of the untimely death of my grandfather. Good luck to you. I'm sure you'll find the effort worthwhile. I know I did.

the trick is to use more than one source so that you can cross reference your data, The two links below are the two I use for the most part, as you say there are many many more each has some thing to offer.

Good luck and good hunting

I wonder if you are not confusing genealogy SITES with PROGRAMS.
A program (Familytreemaker, PAF, so forth) are database programs that can be used online or off, as a storage for your records. For some sites, they encourage you to upload YOUR DATA to their site, and they offer to automatically search between your data and other data that has been loaded.
While many persons go along with that.. I am not among those. My files are not uploaded to any site, which allows me to maintain full control of how it is used/ not used. That's just my opinion, based on 25+ yrs of research.
There is a huge difference between you actually locating records of your ancestors, which can (and often is) available via the internet. Some records WON'T be online. One example are census files, which you can access through ancestry.com (who has all census records), but they are randomly available on other sites. Example.. marriage records for Wise county Texas can be found on the (free) usgenweb page. If you know your grandfather was born in that county, the logic would be to search the records of that county (online, or possibly not).
The more 'popular' concept of finding family, is locating other person's files, which are NOT an original record. That can be ok.. assuming that (1) that person has in fact found the right records to say John Smith is the son of James Smith. If they have NOT found a good original record (ie a birth/death cert) but have just copied from someone else's "file"... then it cannot be assumed to be correct. I could "upload" my file, saying whatever I wanted.. that doesn't automatically make it correct.
My approach is that there IS NO one site that is best. I suggest www.cyndislist.com as a good place to start... for the reason that it is a collection of thousands of genealogy sources that you can use. I feel you are better off knowing how many different places may or may not have records relating to your ancestry. Cyndi's has a great beginner section, where you can find tutorials on how to research your ancestors.