Broderbund Family Tree Maker 8

Life

How many software titles do you know of which contain 24 CD ROMs and a 100 page manual? Not too many, I’d say, and I have to admit that for this review I have not examine the contents of each and every CD! 

Broderbund’s Family Tree Maker has dominated the genealogy software market for ten years and even a cursory evaluation of this package will show you why.

Family Tree Maker is a tool to help you plot your family tree. It’s commendably easy to use for those just starting to research their family history, but contains enough information — and links to further information — for serious genealogists.

The process is broken down into three distinct stages to help make the experience as painless and as intuitive as possible. 

You start (using a wizard) by entering what family details you already know. Naturally enough, the more information you can supply at this initial stage the more additional information you are likely to find subsequently. Using the data you supply, the program then searches its information databases — both on the CD ROMs supplied and on Websites — to help you discover leads to further facts about your family history. 

This second stage of exploring the links suggested by the software can be the most time-consuming, but ultimately the most rewarding, depending on the availability of relevant information and, not least, your powers of perseverance. The third stage facilitated by the program is that of presenting the information you have found. 

Extended families
There really is no limit, bar your own creativity, as to how you can do this. In the Publishing Centre you can generate a variety of reports, calendars, timelines and scrapbooks of family history, each of which can include scanned photographs and sound files if you really want to make an impression.

Family Tree Maker’s no-nonsense data-entry wizards make it a simple matter to enter family data. Its auto-complete feature speeds up the process by finishing a previously used word once you’ve typed the first few letters. Once you have entered all your ancestors’ information, it’s easy to navigate from generation to generation by clicking folder-type tabs at the side of the screen. Once you have completed this stage, the program searches its databases to guide you to the resources most likely to contain information relating to your family. 

On CD ROM these databases include: Passenger and Immigration lists for New York and Boston (1820 –1850); the Canadian Genealogy Index (from the 1600s onwards); the U.S. Mortality Index (1850 –1880) and many more besides. There are even more databanks online, which, once you are connected, will be searched for you. Search results are presented in FamilyFinder Centre, a page that ranks your search results according to the quality of your match. The software includes a subscription to one of the most comprehensive genealogy Websites available, GenealogyLibrary.com.

Clannishness
Family Tree Maker is clearly intended for American users and I cannot imagine a more comprehensive resource for those in the United Stateswith a desire to track down ancestors and their lineage. How useful the databases would be to Irish users, I am less sure, as clearly the vast majority of the data available will be irrelevant. That being said, however, I spent many hours using this program, online and off, following links of interest, and discovered that a number of my own namesakes led pretty interesting lives – if a lot more dangerous than my own. However, it would be less than honest to say was it all plain sailing: many of the searches displayed multiple hits for the same source, and far too many for my liking led me to the Family Archive CD sales site without providing any specific information whatsoever. I also noted that this program crashed more than once when attempting to read from some of the accompanying CD ROMs even though they were straight out of the box. 

I expect that future editions of this software will come on DVD. Using the software, I changed more CDs in an hour than Larry Gogan and, to be quite honest, found the process a little tedious at times, particularly when many of the links led to dead ends. The results of this evaluation, therefore, are inevitably mixed. Family Tree Maker is to be commended for its ease of use, the vast libraries of information shipped with it, or linked to it, and the tremendous variety of printed documents made possible via the Publication Centre. 

By its very nature, however, genealogy can be a frustrating and time-consuming business, and I feel that any genealogy software package should pull out all the stops to minimise this. Multiple CD juggling, dead end Websites and inexplicable computer crashes tend to raise frustration levels. Nonetheless, this program made it clear to me just how fascinating a subject genealogy can be. Older children or teenagers might have enormous fun using this software while learning a great deal about the history of their family.

This software should also lead to a whole host of interesting conversations with relatives, most of whom, in my experience, will be only too delighted to contribute to the knowledge being collected.

Specs
Broderbund Family Tree Maker 8

• If you have a desire to research your family tree, this software will help you do it, as long as you have plenty of spare time and are prepared to spend a good deal of it online. If so, I am quite sure that you will reveal some fascinating information about your own family — or someone else’s.
• Price £59.99
• Contact Diskovery +353 (0)1-873 2822
• Rating 65%