Sunday Spotlight: Ancestris 13

Ancestris 13, the “development” version of the free open-source Java-based genealogy program has seen an uptick in development over the past week, with some major updates, and I haven’t talked about it before, so now would be a good time to mention it, and its predecessor – Ancestris 12. Ancestris is one of just a couple of actively-developed Java genealogy software that is available (Ancestor Tree Manager maybe the only other one).

GenealogyJ is what many genealogists who have been around think of when they hear “Java” and “genealogy software” mixed together, but Ancestris has outlasted it – it’s been around since 1998, so it is probably the oldest Java-based genealogy programs in existence.

It has a decent-sized team behind it (the translation team covers 15 languages, complete with native-language support). Ancestris 13, being Java-based, requires Java 17 and above (you can download it here: Adoptium.net) and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Ancestris 12 runs on all OSes that can run Java 8 – 22.

Ancestris 12, the “stable” version was released in June of this year, and was a major upgrade, with, as the site mentions, over 1,700 commits over 3 years of development.

Ancestris 12 and 13 support GEDCOM 5.5.1 or GEDCOM 7.0, and it contains an actual GEDCOM editor if you want to look at/edit the raw GEDCOM file. Most genealogy programs do not include actual GEDCOM editors for a very good reason – most end-users would not know what they are looking at and should probably not be touching the raw GEDCOM files – GEDCOM files should be what you generate from your genealogy database when you export. However, Ancestris uses GEDCOM as its database, which few genealogy programs do, but then again, so does Family Historian and GEDitCOM II. It makes sense to have a dedicated editor for those who want to see the raw files.

Speaking of the GEDCOM Editor, there are three editors built into Ancestris – Cygnus, which is focused on individual entries and events, the GEDCOM editor, and Aries, which is focused on information in general. Most will probably find themselves using the Aries editor. Here are the three editors (along with screenshots):

• Aries editor | Ancestris – Documentation
• Cygnus editor | Ancestris – Documentation
• Gedcom editor | Ancestris – Documentation

Ancestris 12 also redesigned the duplicate search module and it’s a welcome improvement. Ancestris 12 added imports for the Elie and Aldfaer genealogy programs, which are two European genealogy programs and I doubt many other programs can import directly from them (it should be noted that Aldfaer recently received a major update to Aldfaer 11). More highlights below (here’s the full changelog for Ancestris 12).

If you are looking for free genealogy software, it’s worth looking at Ancestris, although beware – it is GEDCOM-based. I won’t get into the pros and cons of using GEDCOM files as your main database here, but Ancestris has been doing it for 26 years.

Ancestris 13 is currently building upon Ancestris 12 (which is still receiving updates), but there are a few new things/improvements – mainly improving or adding options for the UI and improving the edtiors, along with “WebBook” which is the HTML output of the program (WebBook documents/screenshots)

You can download Ancestris 12 or Ancestris 13 here, along with installation instructions:

Ancestris.org