For this week’s Throwback Thursday Flashback Friday, I thought that in light of MacFamilyTree 11 and MobileFamilyTree 11 being released by Synium Software earlier this week, it would be fun to look back to the late 1990s/2000 at MacFamilyTree 1.x, specifically MacStammbaum 1.9.3 by Stefan Sicurella. Originally Macstammbaum was only available in German, and this version 1.9.3 is not the last version of the v1 series (I think it’s 1.9.6 or 1.9.7) but it’s what I was able to track down.
If you want to skip to the screenshots, click here.
MacStammbaum 1.0 was first released on August 10, 1998, using RealBasic as its programming environment. 1.0 was only available for 68k-Macs (Motorola PCs), and it wasn’t until a year later with version 1.6 that PowerPC Macs were supported. You could work with GEDCOM 5.0 files (5.5 support was added with MacFamilyTree 2.2). For a full history of MacFamilyTree, Synium has a page showing all of the versions here. It was distributed as shareware from what I can find, with demo versions being posted, and the developer taking payments for 40 Deutschmarks (about $35 USD here in 2025) through bank transfers or the postal system. Synium mentioned that MacFamilyTree 3 is the first commercially viable version, and I was surprised as I would have thought MFT 2 would have been, but I’ve not really looked at genealogy software sales and popularity of the 1990s in Europe. At that time, Family Tree Maker for Mac as well as Reunion and Heredis were already available, and GEDitCOM launched in 1998 as well – interesting that those genealogy programs (and MFT) are still around.
So I loaded up SheepShaver (link) that allows me to emulate a Mac OS 9.0.4 (PowerPC) environment on my Apple M-series laptop, and it runs quite nicely and quickly – booting up in less than 30 seconds to a useable desktop is a huge change over the Macs of 25 years ago. It looks like the image below which is a screen capture of my session. Yes, I should have a nice and colorful background, but I do not normally use it daily, and I like having a neutral background when taking screenshots.
If you are curious about what’s in the “Genealogy Apps” folder, I have a few 1990s Mac genealogy programs installed:
- MacStammbaum 1.9.3
- MacFamilyTree 3.6.7
- Reunion 4.0
- Reunion 6.0
- Family Records Program 2.1
- Family Records Program 2.31
You have heard of the last two programs – they are actually Personal Ancestral File 2.1 and Personal Ancestral File 2.31 aka PAF 2.1 and PAF 2.31, and those are a story for another day, because, yes, PAF 2.x for PCs was still using the DOS interface (and would for another 5 years years, through PAF 3.x, until PAF 4 for Windows was released) while these were fully graphical. These were Macintosh versions of the DOS programs, complete with full Mac GUI interfaces based on the PC DOS functionality, and sometimes they were called MacPAF, although I have not seen that in the documentation for either release that I have.
But this is about MacFamilyTree, and this is what you would be presented with – the main editing window for individuals. The tabs you see are for different views, which I’ll have screenshots below showing them. The yellow background could be changed.
According to Synium, it was originally developed for private use, for an upcoming family reunion, and was then released as shareware. A typical Mac for many Mac users from that era would have been a Power Mac G3 or the famous iMac or iBook G3 (Steve Jobs had come back to Apple just a few years before) and based on my experience from that time with G3 Macs, I think it would have ran just fine. Those iMacs and later iBooks were the Macs that really got the attention of more mainstream computer users (and were more affordable than previous -generation Macs). Once you move past the DOS days of the 1980s into the 1990s (both PC and Apple) and moved past the early 90s Macs, performance limitations of genealogy software started to come down (unless you were working with a truly massive database of people or had a lot of multimedia).
This is what MacStammbaum 1 would have looked like on a typical early iBook G3 (I added a screenshot I took to a photo from Wikimedia Commons so excuse the rough mockup):
My impressions, using the sample family tree and media that came with it, is that it was simple to navigate (befitting a 1.0 release that was originally intended for private use) and the simplicity of the interface led to it being fast. Again, I’m running this under a Mac OS 9 emulator on a modern M-series laptop, so I’m not sure what it would have been like on a circa-late 1990s Mac, but I think it was elegantly designed and would have been suitable for most genealogists. The interface was not cluttered – each tab you saw gave you a different view, whether it be a list of people in your database, or the form of a tree or the individual view. There was not a lot buried in menus (and two of the menu options were about selecting the type and size of fonts or about selecting the main color (see below).
On to what it looked like (I think I will start doing videos as well after this).
Stammkarte = Master Card
Liste = List, Frauen = Women, Männer = Men
Below you can see an ahnentafel chart (pedigree chart), and people were numbered within this view in keeping with the standard. Keep in mind that even on the iMac G3s, they had the largest displays most Mac users would have seen at the time, and the displays I believe were 1024×768 cathode ray tubes (CRT), so this is actually about the most information you could have had with that size display and that resolution. I’m impressed the individuals are numbered.
Bilder = Photos
Stammtafel = Family Tree
Statistics (Altersverteilung = age distribution):
You could change some colors of the program (you can see that I changed the default yellow background from the first desktop screenshot to gray):
Finally, you could easily find people (and it was a fast index search).
And let’s look at a few screenshots from MacFamilyTree 11. Screenshots = Synium, but I reduced the size by a third – click the Synium link to see them full size.
