Avanquest Family Tree Maker 2010 review

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Verdict:

With mainly good interface and high-quality charts and reports, FTM is suitable for beginning and experienced family historians alike.

Review Date: 9 Jan 2010

Price when reviewed: £29

Supplier: http://www.genealogysupplies.com

Reviewed By: James Taylor

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Family Tree Maker (FTM) 2010 is the latest version of the popular genealogical database software. It helps you correlate and present all the data you come across when researching your lineage. Confusingly, there are three UK editions, which are all published by Avanquest under licence from Ancestry. The core program is the same for all four with only the extras changing.

The Deluxe Edition comes with a printed Getting Started guide and three month’s membership to the UK-only Essentials service at Ancestry. The Essential service has lots of information, including census records and birth, marriage and death indexes. The Platinum Edition extends the Essentials membership to six months and adds the Little Book of Answers, a printed FAQ booklet. The World edition offers six month’s membership of Ancestry’s World records, which include Irish, Australian, US and Canadian data. You also get the Create Your Own Family Tree Website with three month’s free web hosting and a domain name. Ancestry membership includes searching Ancestry’s other members’ trees and historical records (like census and parish).

There are numerous new features for this 2010 edition. Presentation is improved with a timeline view and the ability to print family group sheets of key ancestors. FTM has slick integration with Ancestry’s server for uploading your trees and reports. Be warned, though, as uploading such data waives your rights over it. You can import media files such as photos, videos, audio clips, or scanned documents, and attach them to entries in your family file. Photos imported into FTM can be organised into slideshows although there’s nothing about this in the Getting Started or Help files. Adding and linking photos to individuals on your tree is, unnecessarily, a two step procedure.

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