Family Tree Maker 2009 Essentials

Family Tree Maker 2009can help you build your family tree, gather stories and photos and create charts and books to share with your family. The Essentials Edition includes a one-month subscription to Ancestry.com ? the world's largest online collection of family history records with more than 7 billion ancestors' names. Enter facts about your family and Family Tree Maker will automatically connect to the site. From there, Family Tree Maker 2009 will let you quickly add historical records and facts from Ancestry.com to your tree. Publish your tree online to share with the whole family. You can also preserve your heritage by adding photos, video and audio clips to your tree. Or use Family Tree Maker's interactive maps, timelines, charts and more to help bring your story to life.

The Essentials Edition also includes:

Family Tree Maker 2009 by Ancestry.com, the #1 selling family history software, can help you easily discover, preserve and share your family history. It can help you build your family tree, gather stories and photos and create charts and books to share with your family. The Essentials Edition includes a one-month subscription to Ancestry.com--the world's largest online collection of family history records with more than 7 billion ancestors' names. You'll also receive an interactive training tutorial and The Family Tree Maker Little Book of Answers.

What's new in Family Tree maker 2009? Exciting new charts and reports Improved data editing and manipulation Enhanced maps, charts and reports A robust "find and replace" functionality Expanded RTF and HTML export Improved file merging and memory usage A way to copy and paste source citations The ability to save and apply templates Increased overall performance

Bonus materials inside: The Getting Started Guide to Family Tree Maker Follow simple directions to begin a project and master the program's basic features Interactive Training Tutorial Get step-by-step instructions and tips that will help you easily build and grow your family tree. The Family Tree Maker Little Book of Answers Read short sections that will tell you how Family Tree Maker can work best for you.

Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting on your family tree, Family Tree Maker 2009 can help you create a family tree faster, easier, and better than ever before. The end result is a family history that you and your family will treasure for years to come.

Family Tree Maker 2009 lets you easily:

• Organize your family story privately and conveniently on your personal computer
• Create charts and reports in a variety of formats to share with friends and family
• Discover new information anywhere on the web and add it to your tree instantly
• Integrate with the 7 billion names in historical records on Ancestry.com. Even receive hints linking you to matching records.
• Incorporate photos, documents and audio, video and other files into your tree.
• View timelines and interactive maps.

How can you make the most of Ancestry.com? Family Tree Maker Deluxe 2009 comes with one month of free access to Ancestry.com, the world's largest online collection of family history resources. Your software works seamlessly with the site so you can easily search for your ancestors and add the information you discover to your tree. You could find missing facts about your family in census records, draft cards, passenger lists, image collections and other historical resources.

What's New?

• Create essential genealogy reports (Register and Ahnentafel)
• Share your family tree with several new charting options: hourglass, bow tie, and fan. You can also use custom templates or design your own
• Streamline your data entry with one-click editing of individuals from any workspace in the software
• Simplify sourcing with "cut and paste" source citations
• Track AND print your ancestors' migration paths on interactive maps
• Enjoy faster startup times and improved file performance
• Find your ancestors more easily with improved Web Search. You can even choose to ignore irrelevant results.

And don't forget the features you've come to rely on:

• Dynamic user interface that lets you quickly switch between important features
• The ability to import data from other genealogy programs, including Personal Ancestry File, The Master Genealogist, and Legacy Family Tree
• Powerful sourcing tools that let you document AND rate each of your citations
• Interactive maps and lists that give you a bird's-eye view of where members of your family come
• Place authority database of more than 3 million names that helps you standardize your place entries
• Photo AND file management features so you can easily incorporate all types of media files into your charts and reports
• Timelines that highlight personal, family, and world events
• Easy-to-use tools for merging duplicate individuals, calculating dates, creating to-do lists, and more

Use Ancestry.com and Family Tree Maker together to get the most out of both.

• Search the extensive record collections at Ancestry.com without ever leaving your family tree! And, when you find new records, you can quickly merge them into your tree.
• Take advantage of Ancestry Hints--Family Tree Maker automatically suggests records that may match people in your tree
• Share heirloom-quality books and attractive posters that you create with the self-publishing tool at Ancestry.com

Your Family Tree Maker 2009 software also includes:

• Training Tutorial for Family Tree Maker 2009 (included on Family Tree Maker disk)
• Getting Started Guide (included on Family Tree Maker disk)

14-day free trial subscription to Ancestry.com.
Search the world's largest online repository of family history records.

This product is a great helpmate to use with [...].My only advice is to use it when you begin your search for ancestors, rather than after you have all ready been searching on Ancestry, or you will pretty much have to re enter all of your data.It will help sort out all the various amounts of info found, and help to weed out any errors.I give this product an "A".

My wife is an avid genealogist and has been using Family Tree Maker for many years. I purchased this for her to replace FTM 2006 that she has been using for the last 3 years or so since that version would not run properly on our new Windows Vista PC (by the way, this 2009 version runs fine on Vista 64 bit, SP1). We had purposefully skipped the upgrade to FTM 2008 because of all the negative reviews we had read.

My wife has been using FTM 2009 for about 3 weeks now, and she loves it. She tells me that there is nothing she could do in FTM 2006 that she cannot do in FTM 2009. (One caveat here - she uses FTM extensively as a research tool and as, of course, a database, but she does not do much printing / publishing with it). She did say there is some "re-learning" to be done, figuring out where to go in the new interface to get things done, but she found the included printed documentation helpful in that regard. Furthermore, she loves how well integrated the Internet is with the rest of the application; e.g., she really likes the integration of Microsoft Virual Earth under the "Places" tab.

One minor issue we had getting it all set up was the download & install of the Enhanced Image Viewer. While the installation file itself downloaded from Ancestry.com OK, it was not an executable file as downloaded. In order to run it, I had to manually add ".exe" to the end of the file name to make it an executable. Then, every time we tried to run it, we got a generic error message that said the installation had failed & to contact FTM support. Only after rebotting the PC & restarting FTM 2009, would it then install. But, in the end, I did not feel this minor annoyance warranted taking away a "star" from my ranking.

Works great . I like the product. Finally updated old 1996 version .

Some what generic looking in appearance but well thought out. I've been using the version 7 for almost 10 years. I tried to load the old version 7 onto my Laptop containing Microsoft XP and failed the attempt. So, I thought it was time for an upgrade. I'm very happy......Family Tree Maker 2009 Essentials

I've been doing genealogy on and off for years, and haven't used FTM for a while. I've been rebuilding my family history [...] and decided it was time to get desktop software, and decided to get FTM 2009 because I figured it would make things easier to switch back and forth. Now, I've been using computers since I was a child, and am quite comfortable with them, but I am having a terrible time navigating around this software. It does not recognize sources that I linked to people in Ancestry, and keeps giving me hints for these sources. I am having to go in, person by person, and ignore all these hints so I don't have the little leaf on every single person. The help files have not been useful, and the email I sent has yet to be answered. I am having problems with merging information as well. I still find it difficult to move around the tree to different people and get their information up.

I don't want to scare people off of the software. It has a lot of room for your notes and sources and media and all kinds of fun stuff. It hasn't crashed (I've got Windows XP). It just isn't really intuitive, and it's likely you'll have to sit down with the instructions to figure out how to do some really basic things (no, the 1920 census is not an "alternate fact" to the 1930 census--it's a completely new source! Gah!)I have issues with any software that you end up having to buy another instruction book to really make use of it, but that's what I guess I will have to do here.