Are Brother's Keeper® and GRANDMA different names for the same thing?
Many people are confused by the relationship between Brother's Keeper® and the GRANDMA Project, sometimes assuming that they are two names for the same thing. This is not the case.
Brother's Keeper is a commercial genealogy program designed by John Steed. It existed before the GRANDMA Project was founded, and is used by many persons outside the GRANDMA Project. Early in the development of GRANDMA, we chose Brother's Keeper as the best program for our purposes, and distribute it on the GRANDMA CD-ROM (look here for an explanation of why we prefer Brother's Keeper).
GRANDMA itself is not a program, but only the genealogical data files that we created using Brother's Keeper. You must use Brother's Keeper (or another compatible genealogy program) to read these data files. These data files are available on the CD-ROM in both Brother's Keeper and Gedcom formats. You need to use the Gedcom file if you are working with a genealogy program other than Brother's Keeper.
GRANDMA users will need to install both Brother's Keeper (or other
compatible program) and the GRANDMA data files onto their hard drives. Users who already have a copy of Brother's
Keeper do not need to reinstall it, unless they wish to upgrade from an earlier
version of Brother's Keeper.
Last modified: 12/13/2006