Pros & Cons
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- Can share family trees online so you and others can access anywhere.
- No monthly fee.
- Free version available.
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- Software is download-only.
- No mobile apps.
- Not a lot of guidance.
Tracing your roots can be a fun activity and Family Tree Maker 2014 ($39.99 download) gives you a place to store your research results and print out basic charts of your family lineage. It's owned by Ancestry, our Editors' Choice for genealogy software. If you want access to Ancestry's array of research resources, you'll have to create an account and link it to your Family Tree Maker account, however. Furthermore, the integration is clunky and confusing. On its own, Family Tree Maker SEE IT is very basic software, and doesn't offer the level of guidance that Ancestry possesses.
Set-up and Interface
You can download Family Tree Maker from the Web or order a CD; there's no free trial. The regular price for the download is $39.99, though it was on sale for $29.99 when I purchased it. Both PC and Mac versions are available; if you opt for the CD version, you'll have to pay $9.95 for shipping and handling. I opted for the download option, although installing it wasn't as simple as I expected. After a few steps, I was prompted to download an update. This is irritating; I can understand needing to run an update for software I install using a CD; I'm not so forgiving when it's a download. Even worse, that update, which was deemed mandatory, failed multiple times, and I couldn't run the software after several tries—even after restarting my computer. I eventually completed the download after using three different forms of technical support. That alone would probably be enough to deter the average user.
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Once you launch the software, you can link it to your Ancestry account to gain access to numerous resources, such as birth, death and census records to fill in any unknown information about your ancestors. If you have any gaps in knowledge about your extended family, you'll really want an Ancestry account. To link the two accounts, you log into Ancestry from within Family Tree Maker, but the process is not straightforward. My username for Ancestry is my email address, but it was rejected by Family Tree Maker; I eventually figured out that I just needed to provide the start of my email (everything before the @ sign), which struck me as odd; I'd expect better consistency across the two products. Issues like these bothered me throughout: when I navigated the Family Tree Maker site, I was often sent to the Ancestry site with no obvious way to get back. The two sites should be integrated better, or even collapsed into one.
