Family Tree Maker Versions 4.0 and 4.4 Review

Family Tree Maker has long been a favorite GSP principally for two reasons: ---1. Most beginners, who have not yet discovered the wonderful variety offered by other more sophisticated programs, and in one or two cases, cheaper programs, find data entry less complex than in other programs and easy to achieve. FTM also offers them a huge help file which contains addresses of genealogy societies, state and county addresses, a "How To..." file of articles that guide them through their first efforts at getting organized, and a Glossary of Terms and Bibliography. Also, because it is now widely used, if you ask "Which GSP is best?" in a chat or via e-mail, the most frequent answer is FTM. Unfortunately the difference between what is "best" from a sales point of view and what is actually "best" is due to lack of information on what a GSP ought to do.


---2. The major attraction of FTM, at least in my mind, are the continuously mounting array of CDs offering all kinds of information - from actual reproductions of pages from genealogy magazines and books to vast Indexes of all sorts - census records, marriages etc. And of course, the lure of "finding your family" on World Family Tree, which is now comprised of 16 CDs with a vast number of family trees. It should be stated here that one does not need FTM to be able to access the information on most of the CDs. However, to download information from World Family Tree, it is best to do so using FTM.

---A note about World Family Tree. Those who use the information from these CDs may be disappointed since many errors in the "trees" have been found. Case in Point - I have been searching for the parents of George Lawrence, from Watertown, MA in the late 1600s. I found that some of the contributors to WFT have assigned him parents that could not possibly be true, at least according to the research I, and others, have done over the last 30 years. So if you wish to use data from WFT be sure you check sources and documentation before you accept the data as valid. If you wish to have your "tree" included on one of the future CDs, be sure you have documented all your data so that future users will be able to find your references to validate the information.



What's New in Version 4.0

---1. FTM version 4.0 introduced their version of the Register or Book format. You can now produce your genealogy in Register format, NGS format or in Ahnentafel format. These will appear like the books you see on families in any library. You have choices on what to include as forms - i.e. pedigree charts, outline descendancy charts etc, as well as group sheets if you like. You can also include an Index as well as pictures you have stored in the Scrapbook. You can then open the book in a word processor and add biographies etc. and edit the material.

---2. Cascading pedigree and descendancy charts. When you request one of these charts, you can now use the "format", then "Tree Format" options and, choosing "Book" at the choices screen, will allow you to print out several generations in the cascaded form.

---3. Version 4.0 also introduced the ability to publish your genealogy - either the descendants of a particular person, the ancestors of a particular person or the whole file to a web page at the FTM web site.

---4. I'm not sure if this was a 4.0 or 4.4 innovation but the Source file entries have been tremendously improved and are more in keeping with how sources should be entered. I looked for a source descriptive text in the help file but the manufacturer has not included a type of definitive description of how documentation from various sources should be entered. We must still rely on the PAF Silicon Valley Users group booklet for that.



What's New in Version 4.4

---The major new innovation is Fan Charts. For those of you who like the idea of papering your walls with your genealogy this is just for you. Personally, Fan Charts leave me unimpressed. There have been some improvements added to the "Register" reports and to web accessibility but other than that, 4.4 lacks those innovations I have been hoping to see FTM include in their program.



What's Missing in FTM at This Point

---1. MATCH/MERGE - This function is still very dicey in FTM. If you choose the global match/merge option you could lose valuable information. If you choose individual match/merge you would first have to find the two to merge. Generating a sorted report might help you find those duplicates but FTM will not search your database and generate a list of duplicates for you to use in merging duplicates.

---2. BOXES - BOXES - BOXES - You CANNOT turn off the boxes. The ancestry and descendancy charts still generate those confounded boxes. Some of you, I am sure, just adore them. They do make pretty charts BUT - you can't get more than four generations, with any kind of information for each person, on a sheet and if your genealogy extends backwards for 10 or more generations, or forward from a single ancestor for several generations, the amount of paper you will use is astounding. It's bad enough with 5 or 6 generations to a sheet but 4 is just awful if you have a large pedigree. I think the Broderbund programmers just can't divorce themselves from flowcharts yet.

---3. LIMITED EVENT ENTRIES. The program still offers only 13 additional event entry fields. AND, once you choose an event to fill one of those fields it becomes global for all individual records in the database. If you want to change one you have to change the data in all of the individual records where the old entries are found. Also, YOU must name the entry field. FTM does not offer you a list of entries possible (there's at least 100 different kinds of events you could choose and some you can create in other programs.)

---4. NO 5 GENERATION WORKING VIEW. All data must be entered from the individual record view. There is no other. When your database becomes very large it is a great boon to have that 5 generation view that you can work within by "walking" it back and forth and see a bigger picture than the single entry screen gives you.

---5. STATEMENTS - Now that FTM creates "Registry" reports (books) you need to learn some things about the canned macro statements used to change your data from a database into readable form. I have included a text on "statements", what they are, how a program uses them etc. in the "functions" folder of this area. You may want to read it at some point in time. Needless to say FTM falls short in this area as you cannot edit the statement macros.

---For those of you who are absolutely sold on FTM I think you should know I DO use it - but not for data entry. There are other programs that do a much better job for this purpose. I use them for data entry and GEDCOM the data to FTM so I can use their outline descendany chart. I also use it to access WFT and other CDs.

NOTE: The opinions expressed in this Software Review are the author/user's own and in no way reflect on the opinions of the Genealogy Forum.

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