NZMac.com - Supporting the New Zealand Mac community

Review
Installation & Documentation
Ease of use
Value for money
Price approx.	?
Operating System	OS 8.6 - OS X
Available from	www.lesterpro.co

So how many member in your family then???Huh don't know ????.well so far I have found 500+. When my mum had her Quadruple bypass I started to think about what and where I came from. That was the easy part, you just talk to family members. Sorting and managing this information was starting to become a nightmare.

I have been an intelligent computer user since the early 1980's and have owned a Mac plus, SE, Si, Performa 6400, G3 and now have G4 original and a 12" white iBook to take to places and gather family info.

I started looking for some equally intelligent software to go with my choice of computer and the picking revealed "Reunion 8". I had recalled buying an earlier version some years ago when I was selling these delicious computers and thought "I could use that", so hunted the CD down and loaded it up and classic environment loaded. This was OK, but a native X version would be nicer, so I jumped on the net and found www.lesterpro.com as the developers. So I emailed them to see if there was a NZ distributor, and whoosh within the day I had a response and the NZ distributors can be found at http://www.leisterpro.com/doc/Buy.html#NewZealand. I already had a version and the distributors are for new sales, so I was able to get the update via their internet site. Once more I was impressed with the service offered by LesterPro. Within 7 days I had sitting in my letterbox a CD of the latest version.

Starting out
Starting out was very simple I was asked if I wanted to create a new family set or Import from a previous version or from a GEDCOM file.

You can export Reunion data as text, graphics, charts and even web pages

I started a new family (starting with me!) then worked from there. And work is an over statement; to add somebody you just click where they should be and start entering their data. This is by far them most intuitive piece of software I have ever purchased and continued to use. The familiar Aqua look and feel make using this application a breeze as you are already using most of these already.

Adding partners and then siblings in today's society has become rather complex - step families, adoptions, family adoptions, surrogate mothers all are handled with great privacy when needed. Further data can be entered at later times when discovered. Extra data can be further used to make Reunion notices with phone number and emails fields available.

Getting data from a genealogy web site is also a breeze if you can find the right info. Just get it as a GEDcom file and import to the family. I have exported data from Reunion to HTML. It's very simple but very handy.

Not only name date of birth and sibling details can be stored, but there are some very useful notes and research fields for storing non-critical but useful information.

I did not look forward to any family members asking for data to use on their Windows computers, however what a surprise I had. With Reunion you can export data as text, graphics, charts, tab delimited...wow just about anything usable on the dark side. Reunion is also fully GEDcom-compatible so data imports and export in gedcom format is easy.

I suggest that all Macintosh users and owners who have an inkling to journey through their history should without a doubt use Reunion and if you're a Mac OS x user, use Reunion X and enjoy the pleasure of your family history thanks to Reunion for OSX.

A demo version is available from http://www.leisterpro.com/doc/Demo/Demo.html

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