The publishers of RootsMagic have just announced the “immediate availability of RootsMagic Essentials” which is a free desktop genealogy software program based on their award-winning RootsMagic 4 program.  RootsMagic Essentials contains many core features found in its namesake that allow the public to easily start tracing their family trees.

When people start researching, they aren’t always ready to pay for a program. RootsMagic Essentials gives people the features they need to start researching and recording their family tree at a price that can’t be beat—free!

RootsMagic Essentials shares many of the same features with the full RootsMagic software including clean and friendly screens, the ability to add an unlimited number of people and events, pictures and media management, the SourceWizard to write your source citations for you, powerful merging and clean-up tools, dozens of reports and charts, support for international character sets, FamilySearch integration, and the ability to share data with other people and software programs.  The full version of RootsMagic is available for purchase and includes features not available in RootsMagic Essentials.

There is a comparison chart showing what is included in both the RootsMagic Essentials, and the RootsMagic programs.

For more information on RootsMagic Essentials, you can read about it on the RootsMagic blog.