Tracing your family history can very soon become both addictive and complicated. Even if you only go back a few generations, you'll soon have a wall covered in a sprawling diagram of your family tree.
Family Tree Maker is designed to help you do away with pencils, rulers and taped-together sheets of paper. The program is essentially a database that allows you to trace unlimited branches of the family, showing who is connected to whom, without confusion.
Information can be accessed in two ways, through either the Family or the Pedigree view. The Family view shows information on a particular person: the names of their parents and siblings; their birth and death dates; their marriage date and so on. It also allows you to enter more detailed information, such as where a person lived, their height, weight and medical history. The Family view also has tools that allow you to add scanned family photographs and to automatically search census records. The Pedigree view shows you a person's family tree, allowing you to see anything from three to seven generations in a single screen. Clicking on a person's entry in the Pedigree view brings up the screen containing their detailed information, allowing you to edit their entry even when you're not in the Family view.
This edition of the program is a simplified version of the 2005 edition of Family Tree Maker that ties in with the BBC's popular Who Do You Think You Are? programme. We were a little disappointed to see that this rebranding didn't bring with it any new features. That said, the product we reviewed last year cost £70, this one costs only £8. Excluded are the data discs containing the English and Scottish parish records stretching back to the mid-16th century, although they're available if you buy the Deluxe version for an extra £15.
REQUIRES Pentium II 333MHz processor, Windows 98 or later, 150MB hard disk space, 128MB RAMTrace generations of your family with this software. An excellent program that will make life much easier for family historians.Author: Karl Wright
Who Do You Think You Are? Standard Edition