Family Forest® Artists, Authors and Poets CD-ROM

The Family Forest® Artists, Authors and Poets CD-ROM delivers what is promised, is nearly foolproof to use and reasonably priced.

Pros

Cons

As someone who both loves and teaches history, I was really intrigued with the possibilities of this CD. What better way to pique one person's interest in another, than to establish family ties?

Each of the forty-five famous names on this CD come with individual PDF files. Each file covers many databased pages of genealogical relationships stretching back to the 16th century and covering many degrees of consanguinity. One needs only Windows Explorer, Adobe Acrobat Reader and a pertinent surname or two to search.

If used with younger children, you'll have to do some prior research to establish their artistic kinships (and, ideally, spark a vibrant interest in the artist or writer in question). It would lend itself easily, as a resource, to smaller classes or co-op settings - especially those lead by creative types!

The price is more than reasonable, given the fact that this compilation represents years of work and mountains of documented research by Family Forest's owners and creators, Bruce and Kristine Harrison. One word of warning, though: After using Artists, Authors and Poets, you'll probably want to get your hands on the much larger Family Forest World Record Edition. The CD reviewed here is but a small slice of this much larger database, which Bruce Harrison describes as a "fully-sourced, lineage-linked digital database with instant access to ancestral connections of millions of people that spans over twenty centuries and multiple continents."