Best Genealogy Software to see siblings, cousins, import, easy to use, photos?

Question

I am ready to buy some genealogy software and am getting confused by reviews and what can do what.
I'd like to:

A. See me, my sibling and my grandmothers first cousins and aunts on a chart- (albeit a wide one!) (Not just me and direct ancestors)

B. Attach photos and input personal stories

C. Link to other trees on-line when a connection is made.

D. Attach info from Ellis Island.org, Ancestry.com and other on-line databases. (Does only Family Treemaker provide an import from Ancestry.com?)

E. Easy, user friendly interface. I'm not computer saavy. I need something easy to use.

F. Publishing capability a plus!

Thank you so much for your advice!

Answer 1

I believe that Family Tree Maker will suit your purposes!! I have used PAF and I have used Family Tree Maker and I prefer the interface of Family Tree Maker.

Some of the latest versions have been great. It has the built in soundex calculator, date calculator and relationship calculator. (which PAF also offers.)

For reports, you can run an ancestor report on a particular person, a descendant report of a particular person, a kinship report showing both civil relationships and canon relationships or you can create a custom report with just the individuals YOU choose.

You can print reports that have:
marriage information
Medical information
Birthdays of living individuals
Address reports

Then you have visual trees that can be done as
Ancestor trees or pedigree charts
Descendant trees
Hourglass trees--- these are trees that show both the ancestors and the descendents of a particular individual of your choosing and
All in one trees--- these show not only direct ancestor or descendant relationships, but all of the relationships such as aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Family group sheets

You can look up women not only by their maiden names, but by their married names as well.

You can also import pictures and create books. It also maintains statistics such as how many people you have in your tree, how many generations your longest line has, How many unique last names are in your tree, How many marriages you have in your tree and the earliest recorded birth.

Merging is easy to do to with this program. For instance if you have a set of brothers that married a pair of sisters and you have entered a set of their parents in twice. you can merge the duplicate individuals so you can see all of their kids together.

You can use the search feature if you so choose to try to find additional information online from other trees; however, I never use that feature. It compares names and dates from your file with those already created on ancestry and gives you ideas for further research. Note: these are just ideas for further research. I never recommend importing someone elses tree into your own.

Entering sources is also very easy.

If you want more information, here is a link
http://www.genealogy.com/soft_ftm_long.h...

Some people swear by PAF and that is fine; however, it is a very basic program. I am also not interested in having the lds ordinances in my tree. There aren't nearly the bells and whistles that Family Tree Maker has on it and quite frankly I like how Family Tree Maker looks visually as opposed to Ancestry. (I am a visual person )

There is no right or wrong answer here. It is all in what your preferences are. There is one thing that I have always wanted my genealogy program to do and I have yet to find a single genealogy program to perform this one thing. It really is quite simple. I would love for my program to be able to pull off all individuals born, married or died in a particular locality and print it into a report. That would be so helpful if one were to go to a library or records repository in a particular county and be able to pull a report with everyone in their tree with ties to that county.

If anyone has found that feature, please E-mail me and let me know. In the meantime, I hope the information in my answer was helpful. Blessings.

P.S. By the way, the price of family Tree Maker varies depending on what CD's come with it. You can get just the program for about $30.00 on ancestry, or you can get a prior version from E-bay for dirt cheap...The software doesn't change a whole lot between versions, so if you get a prior version and try it out, you will know if you want to invest in the latest and greatest version.

Answer 2

Just wait for sometime more time to get a better choice as a company is going to sell a more relevant one in this series

Answer 3

I like Family Tree, but there are many more that are quite good, some of them free.