macOS 27, Golden Gate, reached everyone on Monday 14 September 2026. That afternoon a member of Reunion's own forum opened a thread with four words: "Is Reunion 14 supported?" The answers came from other owners, not from the company. One reported that Reunion "is working as well as it always has", under a signature that says Reunion 12.0. Another hit something odder. "Reunion 14 wasn't working for me after installing Golden Gate. The app opened but nothing happened when trying to open a file." No error message. He guessed at disk access, switched it on, and had to reboot before his file would open. The person who started the thread, on the same OS, had no trouble at all and had granted no disk access.
That exchange tells you most of what you are buying.
It is a document editor for one file on your own Mac.
Reunion pulls nothing in. No census images, no parish registers, no overnight hints, no shared tree, no AI, and no two-way sync with an online tree. What it has is a file on your disk and an unusually good set of tools for working on it. The company's own description names the flagship use case without embarrassment: "Wall charts for family reunions are just one of its specialties." Everything added in version 14 follows the same logic. Find and replace across notes, a noteboard window, bookmark sets, a chart index and coordinate grid, rotatable images in books, decorative chart borders. Those are the release notes of a drafting program, not of a research service.
It scales further than the price suggests. One member of that forum mentions a file of 274,697 individuals.
The Windows version was sold in 1997 and the company still cleans up after it.
Reunion for Windows was acquired by Sierra in July 1997, and Leister Productions became a Mac-only developer that month. Sierra renamed the product Generations. In June 2002 Generations was bought by Genealogy.com, whose parent company was A&E Television Networks, and the new owners eventually abandoned it.
That page still offers to rescue your orphaned file: buy Reunion 14, send them the .UDS file, and they convert it to a Mac family file with sources and citations carried across. Unused sources are the one stated exception. Vendors do not usually maintain a migration path out of a product another company bought and then dropped.
The demo will not open your file, which is the one thing you need to test.
Reunion 14 downloads free and runs in demo mode until it finds a licence. Three of the four published limits are the ordinary kind: 50 people per family file, charts and slideshows cannot be saved, printed output is watermarked. The fourth is not. "Import/Export is disabled."
Read that twice, because it removes the evaluation. You cannot bring your existing GEDCOM into the demo, so you will not discover how Reunion treats your 3,000 people or your citation structure until after you have paid. A trial you cannot load your own data into is a tour of the interface, not a test. If you have a file already, run it through our GEDCOM viewer first, so you at least know what you are asking Reunion to swallow.
Ninety-nine dollars, and any older version qualifies for the upgrade.
The store asks $99.00 for a new licence and $49.95 to upgrade from an older one, in US dollars, download only. You own the software outright, and the licence covers more than one Mac. The upgrade page adds a detail the store leaves out: "The cost is $49.95 (unless you live in Pennsylvania; where sales tax makes the total $52.95)."
Eligibility is the generous part. Any earlier version qualifies, back through 13, 12, 11, 10, 9 and 8, with no stated time limit and no requirement to still have it installed. Older than version 5 and they convert the files for you. Set that against a field where letting a subscription lapse can leave your own tree read-only. There is no US dealer, so you buy direct.
One door does face outward, and it opens onto Leister's own host.
The web reports Reunion generates can be published straight to ReunionFamilyCloud, a hosting service Leister runs itself. This is easy to miss from the outside and impossible to miss from the inside: the shipping binary carries its sign-up, sign-in, upload and file-list endpoints compiled in, and a ReunionFamilyCloud Manager window arrived in the March 2025 build. It costs $50 for a year or $90 for two, for up to 500MB, after a free 30-day trial, with no automatic renewal and a terms page that limits you to "genealogical content created and uploaded from Reunion."
Now the part that decides whether to count it. The service's own status page reads: "ReunionFamilyCloud.com is undergoing some construction." and "Hosted web pages can not be uploaded or modified". Pages already up stay readable, and the hosted-sites list shows six member sites, last updated on 9 September 2026. So Reunion does have a cloud, it is the vendor's own rather than a third party's, and at the time of writing it cannot take a new upload. Treat publishing as a feature to check the status page about rather than one to buy on.
GEDCOM 7.0 and GEDZIP are in, and the export is your only door out.
The version 14 feature list carries a line that is easy to skim past: "GEDCOM 7.0 & GEDZIP." GEDCOM 7.0 landed in 2021, and its GEDZIP packaging is what lets a file travel with its photos inside rather than as a bare text export. It also does full GEDCOM import and export, plus a plain text-file import for data stranded in a spreadsheet.
That matters more than any chart feature here. With no inbound sync and no online tree of your own, the quality of that export decides whether you can ever leave. Our guide to opening a GEDCOM file covers what the format carries and what it quietly drops on the way.
Nothing arrives on its own, and one source it points you at shut down in 2018.
Inbound, the closest Reunion gets to the web is a feature called "Search the web for records." Pick a person and it helps you search genealogical resources "(like FamilyLink, FamilySearch, Ancestry.com, etc.)", which is to say it composes a query and hands it to your browser. No hints, no matches, no queue.
The FamilyLink entry is worth pausing on. MyHeritage bought FamilyLink in November 2011 and announced in June 2018 that "as of September 1, 2018, World Vital Records and Family Link will be shut down". Today familylink.com redirects to a MyHeritage address that answers 404. That entry has been dead for years. The mobile companion is a separate purchase too: ReunionTouch costs $9.99 on the App Store, syncs through iCloud Drive or Dropbox, was last updated on 28 May 2024 and averages 3.7 out of 5 across 56 ratings. Budget it as a convenience, not as the way to get your tree onto a phone.
The software is current. The shop window is two macOS versions behind it.
Worth separating, because the site invites the wrong conclusion. We downloaded the build that ships today and checked it: Reunion 14 is a universal binary carrying both Intel and Apple Silicon code, signed by Leister Productions on 13 April 2026, on a release line whose notes fix named macOS 26 Tahoe issues. It needs macOS 10.12 Sierra or newer, a 2016 release, so old Macs are not cut off either.
Meanwhile the first item on the page of the most common questions from people considering Reunion asks whether it works with macOS 15 Sequoia. A maintained program with an unmaintained storefront, which is exactly why that forum thread had to exist.
Who should buy it.
If you are on a Mac, your research is already gathered, and what you want now is to shape it into something (a properly cited file, a book, a chart big enough for a wall), Reunion is very good at that and $99 is little for a tool you keep. Do not buy it expecting records to come to you: pair it with a subscription or a free source and accept that you are the integration layer between them. If you have not started yet, the disabled import makes this a hard first program to judge before paying, and Gramps is free, native on Apple Silicon and will open your file on day one. We mapped the rest of the platform in genealogy software for Mac, and where it sits against the paid desktop field is in our best genealogy software comparison.
Most writing about this program argues about features. The better question is simpler: do you want your genealogy to live in a document you own, on a machine you control, knowing that each September you will hear from other owners, not from the vendor, whether it still opens your file?
