Judging by the amount of family tree software available, it's clearly one of the more popular pursuits to take up on your PC. That isn't surprising, as the alternative (pre-digital) method of hunting through musty old records certainly isn't for everyone. Fiddling around on your desktop and letting your computer do the leg-work for you is a much more enticing prospect.

However, family tree programs don't always fare that brilliantly when it comes to tracing your relatives back with any accuracy. Greenstreet's Family Tree Heritage searches a number of comprehensive online sources, offering access to over a billion records, and there's no subscription charge to be paid (some programs demand an annual fee).

But before you can get into the search proper, you have to enter the basic information to build your tree with. These are the details of your immediate family, and their all important birth, marriage and death dates. Family Tree Heritage allows for importing data from other family tree programs, providing their databases are kept in the PAF or GEDCOM file format.

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The tree layout itself is basic and the presentation unexciting, although on the positive front it's relatively clean and uncluttered. Once you have the fundamentals down, it's time to hit the search functions, which link over the Internet to the aforementioned billion records.

These are drawn from Ancestry.co.uk, FamilySearch.org and WorldVitalRecords.com. Between the three, we managed to obtain some decent results in our test tree-building runs, although the search processes weren't very well filtered and required a fair bit of poring over. Also, a lot of the leads WorldVitalRecords.com turned up required a subscription to the site, so only some of the information there is actually free.

Family Tree Heritage allows you to attach notes to a person's tree entry, along with relevant documents, pictures and even video clips, which is a useful touch. Family tree charts can be printed with several layout options, and the tree data can be printed out in book report form as well. On top of this there's the option to create a genealogical Web page directly from within the program.

Overall, there's a reasonable range of options here, and some solid online records are referenced. The presentation of Family Tree Heritage is pretty basic, but it's a good starting point for newcomers to genealogy, especially given the price.

What Family Tree Heritage lacks in aesthetics, it makes up for with a large set of links to various genealogical records and the ability to print out a number of different charts and reports. It's a sound introduction to tree-tracing on the PC.