Once upon a time, the pre-Windows, MS-DOS version of Brother's Keeper was the most popular shareware genealogy program in the world. It was the first one I tried. And it has gotten better over the years after stumbling a bit in its move to the Windows platform about a decade ago.

Back then Brothers Keeper was ahead of its time in its ease of use and the variety of printed reports it offered. At least that's what the promo material said. As I recall, I had a heck of a time downloading its various component files then getting it up and running.

When it comes to computer software, either the developer or the end user has to bust his buns. If the developer does, the program is called user-friendly and easy to use. If the developer doesn't and consequently the user has to, the program gets labeled 'hard to use." Users used to debate which camp BK fell into.

Back in the mid-1990s, Brother's Keeper was one of the first genealogy programs to automatically (robotically) produce a book based on its data. It was also one of the first to offer users the option of writing that book to hard drive as an RFT (rich-text format) file that the user could polish in their word processing program.

You don't hear much about Brother's Keeper anymore. In terms of noise in the market place, it never truly recovered from its stumble as it migrated to Windows. Programs like Family Origins were gaining traction just as BK slipped and the rest as they say is history.

Taking the program out for a spin explains why. It is the most DOS-looking Windows program I've seen recently. There are no helpful icons, and no Help screens. Its GEDCOM import is the slowest we've ever seen, and even this 2003 release will not create HTML files. Yet it allows event sourcing for date, place, or both -- pretty much a 2003 feature.

Installation of the demo download from Brother's Keeper web site created an illegally named Folder on my C: drive. That's a no-no in some versions of Windows, as it could -- and did -- cause other programs not to run. So I didn't include the Brother's Keeper demo on the Workshop CD.

Because of the illegal Folder, lack of Help, slow performance, and missing HTML page creation feature: this program is not recommended.