Can you recommend a basic freeware program to track my family tree?

I have a lot of names for both sides of my family, but no organization to it whatsoever. I know genealogy software exists out there, but I’m looking for a simple and FREE version that will allow me to enter the names and possibly even has a feature that creates the visual “tree,” which can often be so helpful in understanding connections.
I just found that PBS has a free download for something called the America 1900 Family Tree Builder. Has anyone tried this? Any thoughts on how it might compare to the Mormon PAF already suggested?

Person Ancestral File, or PAF. The Mormons will give it to you for free. Go to

http://www.familysearch.org/eng/default.asp

and scroll down, looking on the right for “Download PAF”.

Also “Free Color Charts”, just below PAF, which looks like it is exactly what you wanted.

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Added later:

You can Google “Genealogy Software Comparisons” if you like. PAF has been around for 20 years, has a sizeable user community (several of the top 10 on the domestic version of Y!A Genealogy swear by it), and there are forums devoted to its use on both GenForum and Ancesrty. You can walk into any LDS FHC and find people who use it.

I’m a Roots Magic fan, myself, but it is $29.

The Mormons don’t look like they are going to go out of business soon, so there will be support for it for a long time. Whatever PBS has this week may take off and may not.

PAF will work for you. Just get it and start entering your data. You won’t find any tool (even Roots Magic) that does everything you want exactly as you want it, unless you are willing to spend 3 years writing it yourself. (Assuming you can program in a 4GL language and have a trust fund, so you can devote the year or two it would take to writing it.)

You can get a “light” version of Legacy, last time I looked. Since they want you to buy the full version, it won’t have as many features.

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