Brother's Keeper

The History of Brother's Keeper

When I attended family reunions as a child, I was curious as to how I was related to those people that I would see every few years. My parents or my grandmother would explain the relationship to me with something like, "Well his mother is a cousin to your father so that would make him your second cousin." Prior to attending a family reunion in 1984, I wrote a program that would compute relationships, and I gave each person at the reunion a printout showing how he or she was related to everyone else there. I later made some changes to the program and started spreading it around as shareware with the hope of making some money. The response was very small, but I received some suggestions from people that had tried the program. I would make the changes and then pass the new version around and receive more suggestions. I am not a genealogist, but I listened to the advice of the people that wrote me with suggestions. I worked on the program almost every evening for three years before it was successful enough for me to consider quitting my "regular" job.
I joined the Association of Shareware Professionals in 1989 and am currently working full time on upgrading and supporting the program.

The program was called FAMILY when I first wrote it. So version 1.0 was Family.
I uploaded it to Compuserve and I got some feedback from users. I worked on changes in the evening at my home. After a couple years I released Family 2.0.

When I wrote version 3.0  I changed the name to FAMILY3

At that time there were several programs called FAMILY or something similar like Family Edge, Family Tree, Family Tree Etc, Family History System, Family Tree Maker.

So I decided to change the name so that my program would not be confused with other programs.

So when version 4.0 was ready, I changed the name to Brother's Keeper.

FAMILY3 had one extra date and place field. BROTHER has three extra date and place fields.  You are given the option to move the extra date and place to any of the 3 new places. You may decide whether to put it between born and died, or in one of the two places after died. If you never used the extra date and place field for anyone in FAMILY3, just choose any of the 3 new locations. While the conversion process is progressing, the names of the people being converted will display on the screen.

BK5
BK5 was first as a DOS version, but in 6. February 1996 the Windows version was released. To go from DOS to Windows there was build cinvertion between DOS and windows. Som surprise was connected to convert fraom English charector set to Windows, but the solution was when BK6 was released 13 december 2000. Programmet kunne etter den tids teknologi lett brukes på moderne maskiner uten problemer. 

De som da hadde DOS versjoner, kunne konvertere til Windows versjon. Dette ga en del overraskelser for de ikke-engelske bokstavene. 13 desember 2000 kom versjon 6 som var et stort fremskritt i bruken av kilder, bilder og bedre behandling av biografier.

BK6
16 desember 2000 kom versjon 6 som var et stort fremskritt: Programmet har hele tiden blitt videreutviklet samtidig som BK5 (windows) ble vedlikeholdt og utviklet, men alt må ta sin slutt, så også med BK5. (Siste versjon var 5.2.1.36 av 13 feb 2003). Siden har BK6 bltt utviklet videre og har nå de fleste funksjonalitetene som trenges.

Men programmet fortsetter sin utvikling i samsvar med den moderne tid og ny teknologi.

BK7
18 februar 2014 kom versjon 7 som var et stort fremskritt: Programmet har hele tiden blitt videreutviklet samtidig som BK6 (windows) ble vedlikeholdt. Versjon 7 fikk også med konverteringsprogram som gjør overgang fra BK6 til BK7 veldig enkelt og automatisk.

The owners personal education
John Steed is a graduated of the University of Michigan (1976) and Wayne State Law School (1979). He began working with computers in 1975 and started working on my first genealogy computer program in 1982.