Most genealogy software is built to hold your family tree. GenSmarts is built to read it back to you and point out everything you haven’t looked for yet. It doesn’t create trees, doesn’t compete with Ancestry or MyHeritage for online records, and hasn’t fundamentally changed its core idea since it first shipped in 2004. What it does — take the data already sitting in your existing genealogy program and turn it into a specific, person-by-person research to-do list — it still does well, and it remains one of the few tools in this category built around that single job.

What GenSmarts Is

GenSmarts is a Windows utility developed by Underwood Innovations, LLC, a small, family-run software company founded by R. Aaron Underwood. It was first released in 2004 and reviewed favorably in Family Tree Magazine that year as an early application of “artificial intelligence” to genealogy — a label that, in this case, means a rules-based analysis engine rather than a modern machine-learning model. The software is now on its second major version, GenSmarts 2, and remains available for purchase and trial directly from the developer.

Rather than functioning as a standalone family tree program, GenSmarts reads data directly out of an existing genealogy file — no GEDCOM export required — and supports more than a dozen popular programs, including Family Tree Maker, Legacy Family Tree, and RootsMagic. It then analyzes that data for gaps and generates a customized list of research recommendations, ancestor by ancestor.

What Makes It Distinctive

Context-aware recommendations. GenSmarts’ signature move is reasoning about a person’s documented life dates to suggest specific record types worth checking — a birth in 1841, a marriage in 1858, and a death in 1919 will prompt suggestions for marriage records, Civil War–era records, and the federal censuses that would have caught this person while alive. It’s a straightforward idea, but having it generated automatically, for every person in a large file, saves real time over working it out person by person.

Indirect research logic. More interesting is GenSmarts’ handling of indirect leads — the developer’s own example describes an ancestor born in 1780 whose direct-line son was born in 1800, both of whom died before 1850, seemingly putting them out of reach of any census that recorded birthplace of parents. GenSmarts checks whether a *sibling* of that son was still alive in 1880, when the census began asking for parents’ birthplaces — a research angle many genealogists wouldn’t think to check on their own, since the direct line itself looks like a dead end.

One-click lookups. Where a recommendation points to a source available online, GenSmarts can open the relevant site and pre-fill the ancestor’s name automatically, turning a research suggestion into a completed search in a single click.

Free-versus-paid awareness. GenSmarts distinguishes free sites from subscription sites in its recommendations and can be configured to reflect which paid services a researcher actually has access to, filtering out suggestions that would require a subscription the user doesn’t hold.

To-do lists and progress tracking. Beyond generating suggestions, GenSmarts includes research logs and to-do list tracking, giving a large family file some structure for prioritizing what to work on next.

Where It Falls Short

Windows only. GenSmarts has no native macOS or Linux version. Mac and Linux users looking to run it need a Windows compatibility layer such as CrossOver, which adds friction that most alternatives in this category don’t require.

A dated interface. The software’s visual design and workflow haven’t meaningfully changed since its 2000s-era origins. Researchers used to the polish of RootsMagic or Family Tree Maker should expect a noticeably older-feeling experience.

“AI” in name more than in modern substance. GenSmarts predates the current generation of machine-learning and language-model tools by roughly two decades, and its recommendation engine is a fixed set of genealogical rules rather than anything that learns or adapts. That doesn’t make the recommendations less useful, but researchers expecting an LLM-style assistant will find something considerably more mechanical — and, in its defense, considerably more predictable.

It’s an add-on, not a home base. GenSmarts doesn’t build or store your family tree; it depends entirely on data already entered into another program. Researchers without an existing genealogy file to point it at will get nothing out of it until they build one elsewhere first.

Who Should Use GenSmarts

GenSmarts suits researchers who already maintain a substantial family file in a supported program and want a second pass at it — specifically to surface research avenues, like the sibling-census trick above, that are easy to overlook when working through a large tree manually. It is a poor fit for anyone looking for a single, modern, all-in-one genealogy platform, and an unnecessary purchase for a small or just-starting family tree, where the gaps are usually obvious without automated help.

For Dillman researchers with a sizable file already built in RootsMagic, Legacy, or Family Tree Maker, GenSmarts is a reasonably priced way to double-check that no record type has been overlooked for the family’s better-documented lines — particularly useful for the DFA’s incompletely documented groups, where an indirect research angle GenSmarts surfaces might succeed where a direct search has already come up empty.

The Bottom Line

GenSmarts isn’t trying to be RootsMagic or Ancestry, and it doesn’t need to be. It does one job — reading an existing family file and generating a specific, prioritized research list — and has done that job consistently for over two decades without much need to change. For a researcher with a large, established file who wants a systematic second opinion on where to look next, that’s a genuinely useful niche, even running on an interface that hasn’t been redesigned in a very long time.

Learn more or download a trial at gensmarts.com.

Sources

Underwood Innovations, LLC. “GenSmarts.” Accessed July 2026. gensmarts.com.

Underwood Innovations, LLC. “GenSmarts FAQ.” Accessed July 2026. gensmarts.com/faq.html.

“GenSmarts Software Review.” Family Tree Magazine, February 2004. familytreemagazine.com.

GenSmarts logo courtesy of Underwood Innovations, LLC, gensmarts.com. Featured image.

Note: This post was researched and written with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI). All content has been reviewed for accuracy as of October 2026. All errors are the responsibility of the author.