Es selaam,

Since my wife joined a famous online social network few months ago she has re-connected with nearly 200 family members all around the globe.

Her family can be traced back 36 generations but far from all branches of the family tree have been mapped. Especially not the female side of the extended family. The later generations got scattered across borders, a process that has intensified the past decades as life under the post colonial regimes pushed people out of their ancestral regions to find refuge and better opportunities around the globe.

My own family goes back to the Huguenots; French Protestants that were betrayed by the Catholics and who became refugees after the Night of Bartholomew massacre. Some ended up in The Netherlands. Others maybe England or South-Africa. There are links to the USA, Hungary and most certainly: Germany and Austria. It would be nice to hook that information up to Muslim part of the family.

I am looking for genealogy software, this is software used to visualize a family tree and maybe add documents, like old pictures or scans of documents to the archive.

There are a number of packets available and I wonder if someone has experience with them.

Because all the software bundles I have come across is aimed at a Western clientele I dare to question if they are flexible enough to work with mapping an extended family as known in non-Western cultures. Will the software e.g. have to option to add 'titles' given to those family members that are in Western culture not even considered part of the core nucleus (paternal) family? It would also be nice if there were an online version available so people can cooperate online to build the family tree.

If anyone has any experience with family tree software or web sites I like to hear about it.

Wes selaam,

Ibrahim