Ancestral Author helps you document your genealogical research by constructing fully hyperlinked Adobe Acrobat PDF files from GEDCOM files. Use text files and jpeg images to create illustrated books with chapters, descendant reports, ancestor reports, and name index. It is very simple to use, and creates high quality documents that can be printed, emailed, published on the internet, or sent to a service bureau for conversion into a bound book.

Easily transform a downloaded GEDCOM into a PDF. Just drag the GEDCOM onto the Ancestral Author desktop icon, and in a few seconds you'll have a fully hyperlinked and indexed PDF document. This makes it easy to view GEDCOMs downloaded from FamilySearch, Ancestry.com, Rootsweb, Genealogy.com, etc.

Or use the Ancestral Author wizard to create more elaborate PDF documents with title pages, chapters, sections, indexes, source references, table of contents, etc. See a small sample PDF document created by Ancestral Author here.

You can add pictures to your titles pages, such as a family crest, an old picture of the homestead, or a picture of your great-grandparents. Click here for more info.

You can embed pictures within the text of your document. For example, if you've written a biography of your ancestor, you can import a picture of him or her, give it a caption, and place it on the page containing the biography. For a sample, click here. You can also use this capability to import scanned images of old documents. For a sample of this, click here. (It may take a while for the PDF file to download. You'll need have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer.)

You can automatically extract descendant reports from your GEDCOM, starting with any individual, including any number of generations. Any number of descendant reports can be extracted. For example, you can extract your father's ancestry in one descendant report, and your mother's ancestry in another. Each descendant report can be placed in the PDF document with its own chapter, and its own title: "Ancestry of My Mom", "Ancestry of My Dad".

Names are hyperlinked to pages. This makes it easy to navigate the genealogical relationships. Click on a hyperlinked name, and you are brought immediately to the page on which that person appears.

The index is fully hyperlinked too. Once you find someone in the index, just click on the page number, and you are brought immediately to that page.

Operating System: Windows Vista, 7, 8/8.1, 10

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