Delve into your family's past with Family Tree Maker 2009 (Family Tree Maker 2009 Deluxe)

Member Name: Poison_kitty

Product:	Family Tree Maker 2009 Deluxe
Date:	03/10/09 (119 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Straightforward and porwerful

Disadvantages: Slow to load large trees

Family Tree Maker is a series of packages designed to help you build and enrich your family tree, originally designed by Broderbund and then sold to become part of Ancestry.com's line of products. As of writing, the 2010 version has just been released, but prior versions are still very popular within the genealogy community and I personally still use 2009.

The main feature of building your family tree is straightforward to use and will work with as little or as much information as you can provide. The tree builder utilizes two screens - the family screen and the person screen. On the family screen you can see all the connections between family members, although one drawback is that children and siblings of ancestors are not shown until that person is clicked upon. Either double clicking or selecting the person and clicking "Person" brings up the person screen, where you can see expanded facts from their life. On my tree this includes census details, baptisms and burial details, but there are around 50 standard fact types, and the ability to add your own. All facts can be linked to sources which are then listed under the sources tab. A nice feature is that facts linked to places can be plotted on a map (provided by Google) found under the "places" tab, but that is only if Google recognises them. I've found problems with church names, specific addresses and some small villages, especially if in the intervening years they have been absorbed by the urban sprawl and no longer exist. For this reason I tend to use registration districts in the "place" field and add actual addresses in the "description" field. Each fact can also be linked to any sort of media on your computer (although it will only display image files within the program itself) and these linked media will be listed under the "Media" tab.

The program ties in with the Ancestry.com website and will automatically (provided you are connected to the internet) search it's databases for matches to the people in your tree. Depending on whether you have an Ancestry.com subscription you will get more or less information.

There are a number of options for sharing your in-progress family tree (family trees are never finished!). It is possible to export the tree from one computer to another (or one program to another) using three different file formats. FTM 2009 supports GEDCOM 5.5, which is a universal file format that most genealogy programs support. It will also export to a FTM 16 compatible file, and thirdly to a file compatible to all following FTM versions.

Another option is of course to print your tree, and Family Tree maker 2009 has a number of different charts and reports to show various details of your tree. The two most popular are Descendant and Pedigree charts, which come in a variety of different layouts including one which looks like an actual tree!

Now that Family Tree Maker 20010 has been released, prices have dropped a little for the 2009 version, but in my opinion the two versions are not that different, so why pay more than you have to? At http://www.ancestryshop.co.uk, FTM will set you back around £39.99, whilst at Amazon a Platinum edition will cost you £29.99 and includes a 6 month Ancestry Essentials subscription and 30% off it's DNA testing service.

Summary: Charting your family's history couldn't be easier with this software!

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