Started tracing my family Thanksgiving 1976, when I sat my Pappaw Harney down after Thanksgiving dinner and asked him to tell me all he knew about the family.   He remembered his aunts and uncles, some only by their nicknames, but knew little of other Harneys in the area.   In 1977, I started looking at phone books, and made my first trip to the library of the Kentucky Historical Society, located in the Old Capitol Annex, in Frankfort.   I was hooked, and quickly I filled a notebook with notes, and a shoebox with pictures.

In 1979, I bought a TRS80 Model I computer, with 32k of RAM and 2 diskette drives, capable of a whopping 89k of storage each!   No software available, so I started writing my own in Basic, a very simple database program. I transferred that to a Model III, and converted my data to word-processing files.   In 1985, the KGS bought for my use a Tandy 1200, an IBM PC/XT clone, with a 10 megabyte hard drive!

That summer, I came across Roots II, a real genealogy program, by Commsoft, Inc.   I converted my data to that format.   In 1988, I upgraded to Roots III, and still use it as my "base of operations", with over 50 databases.   I also use a couple of other programs, porting data over to them occasionally, via GEDCOM (pronounced jed-com).

I had a long association with Commsoft, however, in 1994, I stopped selling genealogy software, in order to devote more time to my own family research, and other local projects.   Commsoft went on to develop Roots IV, a DOS program with windowing and mouseable interface, with practically no limits.   But alas, with power comes complexity.   Roots IV and it's successors are not for the faint of heart.   They require lots to time to master.   Nevertheless, they offer a way to do all kinds of things that a regular genealogy program cannot.

Roots IV, and its successors, also introduced a change in philosophy for Commsoft, shifting away from a person centered approach, to an event centered approach.   In other words, an event is what everything starts with.   You can connect multiple people to an event, and multiple events to people.   Some events let you imply a relationship between people, and in more ways than just birth or marriage.   Commsoft's event based thinking also called for a new GEDCOM specification, called, you guessed it, Event GEDCOM.   Other vendors have been slow to embrace Event GEDCOM, and GEDCOM is a whole separate subject.

Visual Roots, was Commsoft's first Windows genealogy program.   It was far simpler to use than Roots IV, but it also had less features.   The Windows interface allowed Commsoft to pack more things on each screen than they could in Roots IV, and since Windows is truly graphical, everything was much easier on the eyes and thus, easier to figure out than in Roots IV.

Another advantage to Visual Roots was that it used the same Roots IV database.   In fact, you could go back n forth between the 2 programs and use the same database.   From Roots IV forward, Commsoft developed their software with FoxPro and FoxPro for Windows, and the database was the same for all Commsoft software.   Commsoft also bought a number of FoxPro add-in packages that allow for such things as built-in word-processing capabilities, chart generation, and picture management.

One of the big problems, in my opinion, with all this FoxPro based software is that it's so slow.   Some operations in Commsoft software take far longer than in products from their competitors.

Along about 1994, Commsoft partnered with Palladium Interactive, and changed the name of Visual Roots to Family Gatherings, with some new features, new packaging, and lower price.   In 1995, Commsoft introduced Roots V, the successor to Roots IV, but with a Windows interface.   Therefore, Family Gatherings was targeted at the masses, whereas Roots V was for the power users.

Roots III, and its successors, all print the standard genealogy charts, but they are some of the few genealogy programs on the market that can print "The Register Report", which is the recognized standard for printing family genealogies.   Also, they all can create a back of book index to any and all reports, and for even more flexibility, they allow you to route your reports to disk in Word-Perfect or RTF format, something that a lot of genealogy programs still cannot do.

In July 1997, Commsoft sold out to Palladium Interactive.   Apparently, for legal reasons, Palladium changed the name of Roots V to The Ultimate Family Tree.
Commsoft will still develop software, but all sales and support are thru Palladium, under the Palladium name.