As with everything in life there are at least 2 ways to do anything, the easy way and the hard way. I usually prefer the easy way which means genealogical research is done mostly from the comfort of my chair with a computer, and storing/ sorting data is done on the same computer.

There is also an expensive way and a cheaper way to do most things. Researching your family history is something you can pay someone to do, which can get very expensive, but if all you want is the facts then it is the easiest way. I enjoy the researching so intend to do most of the work myself but by finding other like minded researchers to share information with we should all save time by not duplicating effort and perhaps make friends, if not discover new cousins.

A lot of the tools you need to research with a computer are free, as is the storage of data, if you know where to look or you can buy commercial software and subscriptions to data sites, the choice is yours. I am going to try and do everything without any cost and will detail my efforts here together with some of the commercial stuff, just in case you want to try it.

The first thing I need is some software on my computer to work with the data I am hoping to gather. A simple Google search gave - Results 1 - 10 of about 2,200,000 for genealogy software. This list includes commercial software as well as free so I changed the search and got Results 1 - 10 of about 2,280,000 for genealogy software +free this confused me until I realised that it was adding pages for the free trials and other free things from genealogy sites. Time to get sensible with Google!

You may have noticed that the last search had a + before the word free, I think most users do not know about these search tools, the + before a word (with no space between) means the word must be found, in the same way a - tells Google to exclude the term from the results, so adding -windows would exclude any results for windows programs.

As I prefer the freedom of Open Source Software I use Linux and did a Google search for +genealogy +Linux. I still got 2,160,000 hits but this time almost all the first page were for one program , so of to the main site for it.

GRAMPS helps you track your family tree. It allows you to store, edit, and research genealogical data with your computer. GRAMPS attempts to provide all of the common capabilities of other genealogical programs, but, more importantly, to provide an additional capability of integration not common to these programs. This is the ability to input any bits and pieces of information directly into GRAMPS and rearrange/manipulate any/all data events in the entire data base (in any order or sequence) to assist the user in doing research, analysis and correlation with the potential of filling relationship gaps.
GRAMPS is an open source genealogical software program. It requires the help of it's users to make manuals and tutorials. Fortunately, many users have contributed to the project, by adding tips, tutorials, user guides and examples to this wiki. Your continued involvement to this wiki is required to allow new users to quickly understand GRAMPS, and find answers to their usability questions.

Gramps is also available as a live cd, so it will run on a windows system with the added advantage of letting you try Linux on your computer with risking losing your existing data.

Another option is to build your family tree online, there are lots of sites offering this service, some are free, some appear to be free and others are commercial, I'll post more about these next time, as well as updating the family research.