Nearly everything these days is mobile and less and less people are using their mobile phones just for the mundane purpose of making voice calls (imagine!). So why not make the most of your mobile doo-dad and take care of some genealogy where ever you happen to be? Of course the iPhone and to a lesser degree its sibling the iPod Touch continue to be the rage, so I set out to see what kinds of applications (apps) are out there to make mobile genealogy possible.

iPhone Therefore I Am

Put that Apple device to use as a portable tool for researching your ancestors. There are actually plenty of genealogy applications for iPhone/iPod Touch and most are free or low cost from the iTunes Store:

Genealogy Apps

GEDCOM Viewers

Photo Sharing

  • FamCam share family photos with this app by Family Link.

Black Eye for the BlackBerry?

For those who love their Blackberry devices, sadly, I could not find any Blackberry applications specifically for genealogy, but one person on a message board claimed the Bolt Browser for smartphones could, among other webby things, access Ancestry.com family trees. Give it a try and keep your fingers crossed.

Are you An Android?

Next to iPhone users, users of phones with Google’s Android operating system have it a little better, genealogically speaking. A free program called AGeneDB is available, though it seems a bit rough around the edges in its “Alpha” development stage. For something more polished you might try Family Bee, which costs $10 and allows importing GEDCOM files. Its also been tested reliably with over 30,000 name databases.

Windows Mobile

If your mobile device is of the Windows Mobile variety, you might try My Roots. The program allows you to view and modify data and can import/export GEDCOM data. It even runs on some older Windows mobile systems such as any handheld running Microsoft® Pocket PC 2003, Windows Mobile™ 2003, Windows Mobile 5, or Windows Mobile 6 or later.

That’s pretty much the short list, though there are probably some I’ve missed. Most I have never tried personally, so use at your own risk and enjoy!

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