This is going to be a weekly feature – “Throwback Thursday” where I look at older genealogy software (pre-2000s, pre-Windows 95/OS X). I love looking at old genealogy software and, and I have an extensive collection of genealogy magazines, both physical and digital, going back a few decades, and I’m fascinated by how far we’ve come.
Today’s feature is about “Heartwood”, a Classic Macintosh genealogy program which I saw mentioned in an ad in a 1990 Magazine (Everton’s Genealogical Helper). It was from the aptly-named Heartwood Software, Inc., and sold for $65, which, adjusted for inflation, is around $130 here in 2024.
This was a smaller ad, but as you can see, it was put together very well – you saw what was most likely a screenshot in the bottom left, and what would be recognized as a Macintosh and “Macintosh Owners” to get your attention, the “Heartwood” name, and you had the contact information (I removed the P.O. Box and phone number), and the price and a very brief, but dense description:
“Program for Easily Capturing/Using information on Genealogy including Pictures, Voice, and Text. Draws Interactive Graphical Family Tree quickly! More!”
This would have been before QuickTime was available (so no small/low-resolution QuickTime files on a floppy), so my guess is that the free demo would have been a 3.5-inch floppy with a “shareware” version of the genealogy program, a slideshow (probably .GIF files), or a HyperCard stack.
As for the price, this was actually a fairly cheap price, given the era, regardless of whether it was a Macintosh or PC (DOS or Windows 3.x). At the time of this advertisement, the Macintosh Classic had not yet been released, and it was the first sub-$1,000 Mac (and even then, that’s equivalent to around $2,400 here in 2024). Prior to that, the cheapest contemporary Mac was the Macintosh Plus, at around $2,600 (over $7,000 adjusted for inflation in 2024).
So the hardware itself was expensive, while HyperCard itself was not – it was included for free with Macs.
My guess is that if that’s a screenshot, and given the platform era, the program was probably a Hypercard application (Edit: Turns out I was right! See below). HyperCard was a flat-file database with a user-defined interface, and was actually fairly easy to use, and you could build applications with it rapidly (similar to the databases of today, such as Microsoft Access or AirTable or others). Hypercard was a “hypermedia” application, and could have been designed similar to how one builds simple websites these days – you design a series of virtual cards that hold data (say Info on a family or an individual), and you can have them linked and navigate back and fourth through the stack of cards. There were a lot of Macintosh genealogy programs in the 1980s and 1990s built on Hypercard, including many that would have been built at home and used by just one or two people, because you didn’t need to be a programmer to build them. I’ve got a few of the ones that made it out into the world, and will feature them at a later date.
And Hypercard was a big deal – if you’ve ever heard of a little game called Myst (Wikipedia), it was originally designed and built on Hypercard.
Updated Information!
I should have done this from the start – I have a copy of Donna Przecha’s (and Joan Lowrey) Guide to Genealogy Software (1993), published by Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., and Heartwood was a HyperCard 2.0 application. It had a robust database – looks like unlimited people/families as long as you had the room, and note fields could hold 36,000 characters. You could sort based on names, places, and relatives, and it had the ability to incorporate audio if you had recording equipment for your Mac, as well as photos if you had a scanner.
One very nice feature was that it appears to have supported the early GEDCOM standards.
All in all, this was a much more advanced genealogy app that I thought.
The advertisement above did in fact show a screenshot of the ancestor chart.