Review by ck

Are you the family historian, in charge of corralling ticket stubs, faded photographs, and the stories of previous generations? Or perhaps you’ve already dipped a toe into researching various branches of your family tree, but become overwhelmed with reining in all the bits of information you’ve been finding?nnIf so, you’ve probably been looking for a multimedia method of stitching together various components in a way that’s easier to navigate and control than spreadsheets and folders and narratives, whether electronic, physical or some combination of both. Especially if you are dealing with a combination of file types, once you hit a certain point, the gathering process can feel more like working on your tax return rather than seeking and preserving meaningful connections and interesting stories. Although I enjoy research and don’t mind wrestling data and images, I found building a family history less than pleasant before I began using this program.

Although Family Tree Maker is not especially intuitive, it does have a certain identifiable logic. It may help you to make notes of common steps and processes when you’re getting started so you can boost your comfort level and spend more time on research and less on mechanical underpinnings.

If you’re geographically removed from source materials and areas in which your ancestors lived, you may find that a lot of your research almost must take place online, and thus the tie-in with the Ancestry website is a plus for this program. Keep in mind that if you want to gather specific primary- and secondary-source material, you may still need to provide signed requests for such materials, but the provided 6-month subscription to the Ancestry site does give you a chance to gather as much data as possible, which you can add to in later stages of your work. This has been my method so far, since I’m not fond of subscription-driven software.

While my impression thus far is largely positive, I do think the process of backing up data should be more robust, as should the variety of choices of output. I also am disappointed that the newest version is only available for Windows platforms. Frankly, I wonder how much more peer-to-peer connectivity there might be internationally if this program continued to be as diverse as its users. These two factors, plus some intermittent software hiccups, have caused me to assign a midrange rating. Because of the multimodal nature of this product, I merely mention the complexity and required learning curve, but neither of these factors has impacted my rating.