Review by Harold McFarland

Let me start with what I like about this program. The way it connects to and uses Ancestry.com. Well that was easy enough. That portion of the program is excellent. You can connect, find what you need, have it automatically inserted into the right place and lots of other wonderful things with Ancestry.com. This allows you to build a family tree quickly and is tremendously helpful if you are new or just recently started building your history.

On the other hand, this is one of the most awkward programs available to try to figure out how to do anything manually. If you were trying to build your history by hand by talking to relatives and the like then doing things like adding a step-parent, half-sibling, child out of wedlock, etc, is a nightmare. It can be done, but it is far from intuitive. I have used FTM from very early versions and loved it through the first several iterations. I started with Version 5 and loved it through version 11, then it started being more focused on features at the expense of the user interface and ease of use. And with this version it further frustrates the user experience. The Version 2008 was the last one I would deem user friendly.

The automatic portion can also be confusing as I found myself thinking I had downloaded content that it turns out I had not. When I was not connected to the Internet the content was not there, but when I connected it showed up again. It apparently keeps several items on the Internet by default. However, I did find that I could get it onto my local copy, it was just not intuitive how to do it.

Don’t get me wrong, this is great software and does pretty much everything you need. There are just better choices if you are trying to build or edit by hand. The bottom line is it is the best for automatically building your tree through Ancestry.com (absolutely the best online resource). If you want to do anything else, or have to make a change in any kind of relationship, then it is one of the hardest to work with. It will do it, but expect to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do it and going through the help manual and probably online help.

For me, I am using the subscription to gather information and then just imputing it into my older version. Reports are faster, interface is cleaner, easier to make changes, searches for duplicates, exports, etc are all faster in the older version. If they would just fix the user interface so that it was intuitive to use it I would move it up to a four or five star review.