A bit off the beaten track is this one from Beltech, a new company who intend to specialise in the educational/hobby market. Bel Gen gives the user comprehensive facilities to log information related to their own or indeed anybody's family tree. A Big Brother program for your micro? Perhaps not.

There is no doubt that tracing the family tree has become a popular pastime in recent years and there is no reason why taking the hard work out of it should take the fun out of it. This program should prove very popular therefore with the enthusiasts. Royalty watchers will get a great deal of satisfaction no doubt from mapping the lineage of present day kings and queens, princes and princesses. Indeed, one of the data tapes contains information on this very subject.

The program documentation is full of tips on how to get the best from the program and there is a run through of how to input data - the most tedious part of such activities and the one you least want to get wrong.

There is provision for dates of birth and death and a field for occupation/place of birth, etc, plus a maximum of three spouses (perhaps the one constraint in the program that might conceivably matter).

The sort and printing routines allow the user to follow a particular route through the family tree and to search with a particular option in mind. There are also full data saving routines with checks to make sure that you can't lose any valuable information.

Bel Gen seems to be the ideal package for anyone who spends his/her leisure hours in the pursuit of family or local history. Schools will undoubtedly be able to make use of such a program in any sort of history lesson; the relationships of the Caesars for instance would make interesting printout! The program might (though I doubt it) convert some Beeb users to a new, more traditional hobby.