Family Tree Maker 2005

Genealogy.com, a division of MyFamily.com, recently announced a new version of what is reported to be the best-selling genealogy program, Family Tree Maker. The new version is called Family Tree Maker 2005 and is not just an update, but a complete redesign.

I have not yet seen the new version, but the company's announcement says that the 2005 version has the following new features:

Family View: Family Tree Maker's Family View lets you start with what you already know. Add your immediate family members and up to eight children.

Pedigree View: A side panel makes it easy to view anyone's pedigree through the click of a button, while also providing helpful details on a selected individual. In addition to giving you a great visual overview of your family and making it easy to get around, the Pedigree View will allow you to quickly analyze your tree and identify areas in need of research.

Web Search: With Family Tree Maker's new automatic Web Search running in the background, you can instantly view and analyze search results through the Web Search report. You can easily compare the information found online with the information you already have - side by side! Filter the results to show only the ones you're interested in - by their ranking, by the type of data (e.g., census record, birth record, etc.) or by a status set by you. You can mark a result as something to follow-up on, something to ignore or something you've seen and haven't decided upon yet. Family Tree Maker provides you with the tools to quickly and easily analyze a lot of information to make building your tree a snap!

New Merge Process: Merging and appending data from the web has never been easier. Now Family Tree Maker takes the guesswork out of merging. An easy to use wizard guides you through the incorporation of each new record you find. You can either accept Family Tree Maker's recommendations and add the new data in one step, or you can use the wizard to choose which information to add and whether to make the data 'preferred' or 'alternate' information. None of your existing information will be overwritten.

Bookmarks and History: Now you can quickly jump to the people in your tree that you view most frequently by creating bookmarks or viewing your editing history. Bookmarks are set by you to identify the individuals you access frequently. The History feature automatically tracks the last 30 individuals you edited, enabling you to jump to recently changed people.

Helpful Adjustments: A number of smaller adjustments have been made to Family Tree Maker 2005 to improve your experience with the program, including an automatic notification when program updates are available, a default date display that follows the standard genealogical format (dd mmm yyyy), a more intuitive toolbar, improvements to the GEDCOM importing process, a menu item for compacting the database, and improvements to the process of uploading information to a user home page.

Some of these features do not sound new, but I will withhold comments until I get a chance to see the program for myself. I also was nonplussed that, according to the announcement, Family Tree Maker 2005 allows for "up to eight children." My mother was one of sixteen children, and I have a lot of other families of more than eight children in my family tree. I am curious how those families will be handled.

Previous versions of Family Tree Maker have been available in stores, on the Web, and via mail order for years. Resellers of the program were surprised in recent days when Genealogy.com informed them that resellers worldwide are being eliminated from the distribution of Family Tree Maker 2005 upgrades, effective immediately. In other words, Genealogy.com/MyFamily.com/Ancestry.com is no longer selling the program through resellers. Two resellers with whom I spoke stated that that they were not given any advance notice that this decision was being made, nor even that it was under consideration.

Family Tree Maker 2005 sells for $29.99. Present Family Tree Maker users can upgrade for $19.99. For more information about Family Tree Maker 2005, look at http://www.familytreemaker.com. However, at the time these words are being written, only a brief announcement is available there.

This should be interesting to watch. I hope to get a copy of Family Tree Maker 2005 in the near future and will write about it after using it for a bit.

Comments

[Scott L]

FTM 2005 handles families with more than eight children the same way they always have. You can have as many children as you want on a family. The comment about eight children refers to the fact that they now display eight children at a time on the screen. This is an improvement over previous versions which only dislayed four at a time.

You can see this on the screenshots at their web page, one of which shows a family with 10 children.

[Dino (All Dino, All the Time)]

Dick,

Thanks for the quick look at FTM 2005. I've been running FTM for years and years. I am working on migrating to a new program bu find that FTM's implementation of the GEDCOM standard leaves a lot to be desired.

For instance, if you put in occupations, FTM swaps the occupation and place tags in the GEDCOM file. It also does not handle the CONT and CONC tags properly, causing all sorts of problems with notes.

I'd be interested in hearing about how rigorously they adhere to the actual STANDARD in the 2005 version.

It looks like most of their 'new features' are strictly cosmetic, offering very little new functionality. This has been the trend over the past few upgrades.

The only reason I'd buy the new version would be to get a decent GEDCOM file to migrate off of it.

[Carl S]

The biggest complaint I have with previous versions of FTM is that it is not possible to use the same Source-Citation for more than one data field, without retyping or having to use the Copy/Paste function. It will be interesting to see if they fixed this problem in 2005.

[Imo Greenwood]

Dick;

It looks like they still have a long way to go to improve and give some of the requested features for FTM.

It is sad that they will not concentrate on what many users want to see provided in the program. Most of the new features do not mean very much to the program.

I've used FTM since the first program and have ask for several features to be in the up-dated versions, I know many other people have too, but yet to see what we ask for.

Imo Greenwood

[Robert Ragan]

Here is one feature that I have a question about.

View Two Family Files Simultaneously:

You can view, compare, and edit Family Files side-by-side. You can check for similarities and differences between your files and ones you receive from family members or other genealogy researchers.

This one has been listed with the new benefits, etc. but was it in previous versions?

Thanks ;-) Robert

[Nancy Fermazin]

I tried to transfer my gedcom to another genealogy program using FTM and it did not transfer correctly. Any possiblility they fixed the gedcom transfer?

[Ken]

So, now that FTM is the only genealogy program on most software retailer shelves, FTM is going to cut out the distributor and retailer. This should be interesting.

It is also a great opportunity for FTM competitors. Those retailers want something on their shelves. Which competitor will get the lion's share?

[Brian Bingham]

FTM or AFT? Just got the email announcing FTM 2005. The screen shot of "Pedigree View" looks very similar to the Ancestry Family Tree (AFT) program (an Ancestry.com product). Other screen shots have the same AFT look but with formating and eye candy improvements, supposedly "to improve your experience with the program" Note that there is no "upgrade" for existing FTM. Is this an improved FTM or, a whole new program or, AFT in sheeps clothing? With AFT the "Web Search feature" requires you to be a paid member of Ancestry.com or you get nothing. Its searches are limited almost solely to the Ancestry.com databases. If you had a membership and it expired, clicking on one of the sources it found sends you to a sign-up for a membership page. I am interested to see how they handle this with FTM 2005. Perhaps when you purchase FTM 2005 you get a 3 or 4 month "free subscription". The old FTM was also far superior regarding the variety, formating options and exporting options of reports, books and charts compared to AFT. Did that same FTM functionality move over to the new FTM 2005? I note that they did not mentioned one improvement in these areas. The announcement goes onto say "a menu item for compacting the database" -hey, sorry, FTM has had that for some time, but it would be an improvement for AFT. Again, it even sounds like they are talking about AFT. And, finally "improvements to the process of uploading information to a user home page". Dancing with the devil here - it is nice to share data and find relatives also researching in your tree, but it concerns me that they will limit access to your uploaded records only to paying members. They will be selling your data back to your future generations. In general, it has become concerning to me how MyFamily.com has built a monopoly in Genealogy. It seems that everything in genealogy is being "assimilated" to the Ancestry.com way of doing business in that you are constantly directed into automatically recurring memberships, hounded with emails, "upgrades" and marketing calls. And now FTM. Is this the final death of a once venerable program? ....BB

[Dino (All DIno, All the Time)]

Nancy,

I've long complained, both to FTM and on public boards, about FTM's lack of a reliable and accurate implementation of the GEDCOM standard.

They will NEVER fix this.

What is their incentive to give people the tools to actually move off of their software?

They are more concerned with re-formatting their data entry screens to make people think that they have improved and added functionality to the software.

[Colleen]

Re FTM: What I want to see is more flexibility in the GEDCOM export. I do not always want to export my notes and/or sources. Adding ancestors and siblings of someone not in the line of descent means more than one GEDCOM. I am seriously considering changing to something else although otherwise I like FTM.

Colleen

[Suzi Plooster]

The thing that I dislike is that FTM comes out every year with a piddling "new" version. I buy the update and find that it really offers me very little in basic "new" stuff. I hate to think of how many updates I have bought since my first version of FTM. From now on I will just wait two or three years before I buy any updates and I can then get all the "smidgen bits" of stuff included in a later version. I will have to find out from others first if it is worth buying this new version.

[Emily]

I just installed FTM 2005. I am going to uninstall it. They've taken out all the useful right click functions that were added in version 11! Those functions (copy and paste, for example) can now only be found buried in the toolbar, but the toolbar is entirely rearranged. I found the merge function completely unchanged from version 11, which had been an improvement, but not that great. Using "Reports" is now a pain as it doesn't remember which report you used the last time, you must reselect from the drop down list each time.

Consider FTM 2005 a completely different product, which is prettier, but is far less usefull than before. Rootsmagic 2 (original producers of Family Origins) does an exemplary job of sources and merging compared to FTM 2005.

You wouldn't think it was that difficult to make a really good genealogy program. This one isn't even close.

[Jason Kelly]

FTM 2005 is not AFT in sheep's clothing. It is largely the FTM 11 code base with additinal views, features and improvements. For example, GEDCOM importing is much improved as is the Edit Individual dialog. A very nice Pedgree view has also been added with a useful navigation sidebar. As someone has already pointed out, you can still add 99 children, but the family view now displays eight at once, instead of four.

[S. Brooke]

Thanks for making up my mind about purchasing FTM 2005; I won't. Frankly my first FTM purchase about 5 years ago was the best; it came with CD's which you don't get with add-ons and I get kinship views with one person having two or more relationships with me. Where do I purchase individual FTM CD's for a reasonable price? Neither social security, Ancestry.com or Genealogy.com have much consideration for the senior citizens who now have the time if not the finances to pursue their families.

[Dino (All Dino, All the Time)]

Look on eBay. But don't waste your time on the World Family Tree CD's. They're full of poorly researched, sometimes fabricated family trees. I don't doubt that there is some good data there, but you'll never know what is good and what is bad.

[John Leith]

As a long time FTM user, I "upgraded" to FTM2005 and innocently had it open my 130 MB main data file. Oops! It changed the file so FTM 11 could not read it, and I found FTM2005 screens repulsive, too busy, too hard to read, etc. FTM 2005 also rendered FTM 11 unlaunchable. Fortunately I had a backup CD of my data file and I reinstalled FTM 11, and I'm happy again with FTM 11. Maybe when I grow up I will try FTM 2005 some day.
For those who get tired of copy-pasting certain citations, try CE Software's QuicKeys for Windows. I have 40 ro 50 macros in it that I use for census citations, etc., in FTM 11, with "one-click" ease. 2 Mar 2005

[Bob Runion]

Ever so carefully, I am slowly migrating to Linux Operating System (specifically Fedora Core 3 at the present) and 'GRAMPS' as my genealogy program. Linux has some drawbacks, but they have a universe of software that is free - GRAMPS is one of them.

Bob

[John]

I am having a odd problem. I have been using 2005 for the last 4 years. I recently purchsed a new laptop and when I installed it on the new machine and hit the update. Now it tells me that my family tree file was created with a newer version of 2005 please help??