Review by Ty Arthur

For keeping track of many different members from any side of the family, a genealogy program like Family Tree Maker can be an invaluable and time-saving tool. While family history fanatics will likely still get a lot out of it, this particular program is unfortunately bogged down by an unwieldy interface and complicated design.

There are simply too many screens to navigate through to get to any given option, and frequently they are arranged in odd ways. Once data has been entered in the main family tree, it can also be difficult to scroll through the tree and get back to previous entries for other family members earlier in the tree. Performing searches for birth or death certificates and moving back or forward through results also gets unnecessarily complicated.

On the plus side, there are many features available for arranging your family tree in just about any configuration imaginable. Anyone wanting to print off a professional looking tree to show off at family gatherings will have everything they need, and then some.

Family Tree Maker 2011 comes with a free one month subscription to Ancestry.com, which offsets the cost of the software itself. While there is a huge amount of information to be found through the Ancestry website, it’s not a simple matter of going back through your history and immediately finding all the names and locations. Finding specific information on a family member is time consuming and there often isn’t any helpful data available. If you don’t already know the full name, date of birth, and a location where the person lived, it’s likely you’ll never be able to find the next member in your family tree.

Overall Family Tree Maker 2011 is a decent, if overly complicated, means of storing all the information from your family’s history. The free month Ancestry.com subscription is a nice bonus, but a user really needs to keep paying for the service in order to continue finding information, so unfortunately the software comes off a bit like an advertisement for the web service.