Create HTML family trees with Genealogica Grafica

Genealogica Grafica is a Windows shareware application which creates various family tree charts and reports from GEDCOM files, saving them as HTML files ready for sharing on your own website.

If the program name sounds familiar, that’s no great surprise -- the first release appeared way back in 2006. But after a long pause, development seems to have resumed again, with support for Unicode and (partially) stylesheets. We downloaded the latest release to see how it looked.

The interface frequently ignores standards to go its own way. This isn’t a fatal problem, more a matter of realizing that (for instance) there is no "Import" or "Open GEDCOM" option, and instead you need "Restart with GEDCOM" instead.

GEDCOM handling is better, fortunately, with Genealogica Grafica detecting and highlighting inconsistencies in a report.

Choose a starting person and it’s easy enough to produce an ancestor or descendant chart, circle or tree, intermarriage, pedigree loss or relationship charts.

These aren’t static images, either. Create an ancestor chart and you’ll get both the tree and a text report of all the individuals it contains, and their details, as extracted from the GEDCOM. These are linked -- clicking a name in the chart jumps to that person in the tree -- and they’re HTML-based and ready to share immediately on your own website (see this Dutch example).

Genealogica Grafica could be easier to use, and the reports aren’t visually impressive any more. But there are some unusual report types, they’re all very configurable, and if you need something you can share on your own website then, even these days, it might be worth a try.