Review by Carol T.

Family Tree Maker Essentials is a great tool. In theory. But in reality, the program does not function as it should. Start-up is very slow as well as the connection to ancestry.com. Whenever you make changes to the tree, the page reload is very slow like it has to think about it before doing it. I’m using this on a fairly new Windows 7, 64-bit computer so I know it’s not on my end when I get response failure messages. It’s tedious and makes me not want to use it with all of its little ticks.

Every time I open the program, I get a message stating that there is a required update, which is fine since updates to any program are important. But I keep getting an error message that I can’t update the software. After lots of frustration and a few phone calls to friends in the tech business, I learned that the updates won’t install unless I disable my virus protection software and that’s not good. I did it, but I didn’t like doing it. I shouldn’t need to do it for an update. Something they need to work on. Some of the updates loaded and some did not. But I’ve sort of stopped using it temporarily until I do more research on how to getting this working properly.

It’s not a very expensive product but even so, it needs to function as advertised. It works best in conjunction with a subscription to ancestry.com but as I worked with the program I didn’t find a reason why you couldn’t just subscribe to ancestry.com directly and build a family tree directly through the main site. Having this and a subscription to the main site seems to make the process more complicated and kind of redundant.

Good starter version for a beginner but will frustrate a more experienced user.