Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1600 in Software
• Brand: Avanquest Software
• Released on: 2005-10-10
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows 95

Manufacturer's Description
Getting started is easy. Just enter the information you already know and watch your tree take shape. As your research gets going, you can add new relatives to your tree storing other information you've collected along the way; birth dates, birthplaces, marriages and deaths. You can easily add notes, photos, images and documents on each person, to tell his or her story.

The program will automatically search the largest online collection of family history information at Ancestry.co.uk. A Web Search Report allows you to compare the search results side-by-side with The information in your tree, so you can quickly determine whether it's relevant. You can then merge the record directly into your Family Tree file.

Bring your family story to life by designing and customising a wide variety of charts, trees and reports with images, photos, colours fonts and borders. You can even create a family tree albumas a precious keepsake to pass down through the generations.

Once you've completed all the hard work and research, it's time to share your results with family and friends. Produce a professional looking family book, print-out heirloom quality family trees, Publish a family web page, or email your family file to others around the world.

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

Does The Basics
It works fairly well, providing a nice variety of trees and forms. It can be a bit annoying to enter some details, but the basics are good.

It is however useless in several ways. Firstly, completely American, the product needs to be made more British friendly. Secondly, the Data CDs are complete junk, they contain no details of interest, and only one of the CDs I've actually got to work! Thirdly, it can be a nightmare to record more than one marriage, the programme does allow you to set it so that a couple can be divorced, but not remarried, which is a complete nightmare for me, as just one of my Ancestors had 4 wives alone. I've now actually managed to find the ability to navigate between spouses but it has taken me several weeks to do so!

If you just want somewhere to record then this should meet your needs, but otherwise this doesn't work well for detailed research


UPDATE: Now installed on Vista, works quite well, but unable to export a family tree (5-600 people) into PDF at all - it now crashes the program. In XP I had another problem with the export, but that was simply that the exported tree would not look right, the program would not have any difficulty, just the final product was 99 times out of 100 dodgy!

Make Some Time To Research Your Family Tree!
Having just read the previous review "Don't Waste Your Time", I decide to put pen to paper, as it were!
As an owner of this particular product for some little time, I have found it an extremely easy to use piece of software, very well laid out and very intuitive when adding various relatives.

Once you added your relatives, just transfer them over to a wide variety of charts and different style trees. ready to be printed off.

My son who is currently at Junior school has also found this very helpful in doing his homework which was to produce a family tree of his direct relatives as part of his school work in the curriculum.

The 30 Day Free Trial was exactly that 30 day's of free use of the Ancestry.co.uk website and database! Had I gone to the website as suggested by the previuos review, if I'd known it existed, I would have been able to sign up for a free trial but only for 14 days! and I would still have had to give my credit card details. That said, having read the terms and conditions prior to signing up, which I was asked to do, there is a section which easily describes how to cancel your subscription should you wish to, either by email, with link or by using a free phone number, listed for you. This I used and had my details cancelled with no problems at all.

Having finished my 30 day free trial, I am no longer able to access the 1851 census, but as I still have my sampler disc this is no problem.
The parish records disc, I've had no problems with.
The Family Tree Maker software is great value on its own and very detailed, well worth the price. Add in the extra discs and two written manuals, I would have no hesitation in highly recommending this product.

Who do you think you are? A Tog?
The software seems pretty sound and appears to do what it says.
I have put in all my family tree without reading the manual, but when looking how to print out books etc I found the On Line Tutor pages long winded and boring, you had to watch a screen shot of it being done before you could go on to the next step.
It follows the usual American pattern of expecting the user to be a complete dumbo and explains the actions in a way that most people got out of in nursary school and whilst doing that it seems to make it hard to cut to the chase or find how to do difficult things.
The supplied CDs with the deluxe version are very useful if you want to make Bird Scarers for the seed patch but I think you would need to be very lucky to find an ancester on them.
The free trial of ancestry wbsite is really good and has helped me fill in a great deal of family history and cross checking.
However I found it was easier to approach the searches via their website and not use the clever little button on their tree entry: if you use this the first hundred hits seem always to be in America even if your ancester lived in Birminghan and never even owned a bike!
It is because the CDs were not really worth having and the usual annoyance that American products only pay lip service to the Anglicizing that I have reduced the score.