Family Tree Maker – Now and The Road Ahead
by Duff Wilson

For over thirty years, Family Tree Maker has been helping people discover, grow and share their family trees.  In this presentation, Duff will introduce some of the things for which Family Tree Maker is well-known, as well as some exciting new capabilities that are coming. This class is for all levels from beginner to advanced.

Easy to Learn and Use

Family Tree Maker can be tailored to give you a rich view that includes an index, a tree view of a person’s ancestors, immediate family, and personal detail. This provides easy access to your family information and a rich view of your family tree without needing to switch between different screens.

Or you can simplify the user interface to focus more on the family of the selected individual by collapsing the index panel and enlarging the family view to see all of the children.

Ancestry Integration

Do you use Ancestry? Family Tree Maker has a smooth integration with Ancestry that makes it easy to work seamlessly with both, including:

• Ancestry hints
• Record search & merge
• Syncing with your Ancestry tree
• Starting a tree from Ancestry

TreeVault Cloud Services 

• •  FTM Connect™ mobile app viewer (for iPad, iPhone and Android). You and your relatives can view your tree on their smartphones and tablets.
  •  Complete copy of your tree in the cloud.
  •  Historical Weather™ puts color in your family story with more than a billion historical weather records. Dates will never be boring again.
  •  Next of Kin™ allows you to designate a successor to your TreeVault account to pass your family tree along to your heirs. You will get a certificate that could be included with a will, providing instructions and passcodes for taking over your account along with your Family Tree Maker license.

Turn Back Time—Keeps track of, and in case of a mistake, allows you to roll back your tree to any one of your last ONE THOUSAND changes.

Rich Color Coding—In addition to color-coding ancestors, rich color-coding allows you to color-code your ancestors’ descendants throughout your entire tree.

A Few Things Coming in the Road Ahead

Sharing and collaboration—Being able to invite others to view and collaborate on your family tree—even your family tree on your desktop will soon be possible. Family Tree Maker is working on some powerful and easy ways to break through this barrier and allow family members to share, interact, and collaborate on building your family tree.

AlbumWALK— Every photo has a story or two to tell. AlbumWALK is a new product that works with Family Tree Maker to make it easy to capture the memories of those who were there when your photographs were taken. Using AlbumWALK’s patented tap-talk interface, just tap a face on a photo on your smart phone or tablet, and talk about that person. Tap the next and talk. And when you have finished, AlbumWALK creates a mini-documentary, zooming in on each person as they are mentioned, along with professionally scored background music. AlbumWALK is soon to be available on iOS and Android devices and is fully supported in Family Tree Maker.

Family Tree Maker Workspaces

Family Tree Maker has seven focus areas or workspaces each containing powerful but easy-to-use features and tools dedicated to the following Family History topics:

Plan Start a new tree, view information about your tree, and manage tasks.

People Build your family tree and see people displayed as families and individuals.

Places See maps and information about the places where your ancestors lived.

Media Manage the media (photos, documents, & files) associated with your tree.

Sources Manage and document the sources of your family tree information.

Publish Create and print charts, reports, and books from your family tree.

Web Search Search Ancestry®, FamilySearch, and the Internet for information about your ancestors.

 

Registration for the NGS 2023 Family History Conference is now open at https://conference.ngsgenealogy.org/.