Family tree Software

[NannyL]

Can anyone recommend (or 'unrecommend') any software for recording your family tree...

something more sophisticated than the free software with genesreunites / ancestry.com etc!

Anybody use anything that they think works well

PLEASE!
TIA

We have family tree maker 2005 and I absolutely hate it. The previous versions were much more user friendly but if you don't upgrade regularly enough you'll fall behind so far that you won't be able to upgrade in future - apparently, so we have and this latest version is ewwwwwwwwwwww! I went spare went I found how un-user friendly the upgrade was but there's no way of turning back the clock, dh says. I have hardly touched my family tree for months now (partly as a result and partly due to a lack of time) and I'd hate to type it all into a new programme that is user friendly as I have about 2000 people in mine. Hth.

thank you very much!

I will note NOT to use that one!

I felt a bit guilty later, NannyL, as I hadn't sung its praises of how it was before the last upgrade we did. I loved the Ancester tree and the Descendant one and the Hourglass one on one of the later versions was good, too. I also liked the blurby bit where you could choose someone and have a wordy report on them. The tabs on the page of a person's home page (so to speak) used to be easy to click on (on the right hand side) not, tiny teeny ones on the left that are such a pain to click on. To recap, a good one is really good but a bad one is a complete pain in the butt. You're doing the right thing in asking around. Hopefully by bumping this for you, you'll get some good recommendations. Good luck!

We have Family Historian, version 2.1, and have not had any problems with it.

Sorry to hijack but this seems to be a really good place to ask my question.

Can you give me some pointers on how to look up our family tree? We can take some of the branches back to 1825 but would love to see just how far back we can go with the whole family.

mummyhill, going back as far as 1825 you're well and truly off the censuses, central registration of births, marriages and deaths etc (at least in the UK). You will probably have to look at parish records etc, but the \link{http://www.familysearch.org/\IGI} may be worth a try.

Do join the local family history societies for the areas where your ancestors lived, as someone may already have done the work or may be able to point you in the right direction.

If you have any ancestors with unusual names, or names that are unusual in the place they lived, you could try Google - I found the black sheep of my family that way!

stick all your family tree that you know on genes reunited and then JOIN (cost £7.50) for a year

i "joined" on friday and already when combining other peoples trees have 12,000 relations that i could put on... (TBH i dont really care who G^x grandprents siblings spouses parents kids married etc etc etc!)

got just 237 of my own (which are grandparenst . great grandparents and their siblings, not come 'down' at all)

found my 4th cousin once removed who had traced 1 branch of my family right back to 1650. Great^8 grandparents!

Its fascinating.... even more so as almost all my family come from a 10 mile radius of where i live!

I think its hard to go back on your computer much before 1800. Ive used all the census information on ancestry.co.uk (a brilliant site) from that my earliest relation was a G^5 grandparenst born in 1764, still alive living with their child on 1851 census.

The 1841 census is due to be released soon, i cant wait! Im sure it will give me lots more information.

Thanks for the pointers off to do more research.

good luck!