Posted By crates on April 23, 2008

   One of my great interests is genealogy.  I became interested in tracing my family history quite a few years ago, from talking to my father’s mother who was part of a great, close-knit clan of Walkers.  I caught fire from her and immediately began researching my family history.  I haunted libraries and courthouses, making special trips to small towns in various states, searching through little country cemeteries, and in a short time I had gathered a large amount of data.  

          I was very lucky in having young parents and young grandparents.  All but one of my grandparents were in their thirties when I was born (one being thirty-four), and as a consequence, I had access to their memories and information which I mined.  My mother’s father was especially full of stories about his family and childhood and took great delight in regaling us all.

     This was before computers revolutionized the field.  Once I had access to the internet using various genealogy programs, the rate of information acquisition began to increase exponentially.   After trying several programs, I settled years ago upon Family Tree Maker.  I’ve been very satisfied with this program for many years—-until recently that is.  One thing that irritates me is that they seem to have increased their number of upgrades but continue to charge full price for them.  Also I found that my Family Tree Maker 16 was not compatible with Windows Vista.

     I have spent a huge amount of time preparing some books on the genealogy of my family.  I have a modest number of people (approximately 4500) compared with the tens of thousands that others have added to their genealogy, but I found that I could not open and preview these books in Windows Vista.  When I found there was a patch, I immediately downloaded it but it didn’t fix the problem.  I have found other suggestions online that promised to fix the problem, but which proved to be totally ineffective.  I still could not preview the books on Vista.

     So, having no luck using FTM 16 with Windows Vista, I went ahead and purchased Family Tree Maker 2008 which was billed as being compatible with Vista.  When I loaded this program today, I found that the program no longer supported the writing of genealogy books, but now required that the information be sent to Ancestry.com so that they could put the book together–at a substantial fee of course.  Also according to some reviewers, the program was released far too early and was chock full of bugs.

       So…I reloaded FTM 16 back onto my old computer which runs Windows ME,  and it runs just fine.    My advice is to avoid FTM 2008 if  you want to use the program to write  your own genealogy books.  There seems to be always a tendency towards taking simple effective programs and making them into cumbersome, slow, bloated dinosaurs.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: family history, Family Tree Maker, genealogy