Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good Program
Comment: I had use an older program several years ago (Family Tree Maker) and this is much easier to use, or I'm just older and more literate. Anyway very good program.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Roots Magic genealogy software
Comment: Seems to work fine. Was able to load large pre-existing genealogy file. Some trouble between GEDCOM file codes used by Family Tree Maker, but not recognized by Roots Magic. It will take some hand editing to fix that. Caught by Roots Magic, but another good reason to abandon Family Tree Maker which has tied itself to unacceptible, unwanted, uneeded, Internet connections. Quick delivery of the CD directly from the source company.
Customer Rating:
Summary: fantastic genealogy software
Comment: I've had this software for quite a while now and find it to be the best genealogy program that I have used. I abandoned Family Tree Maker in favor of trying this product. It's a meat and potatoes program that you will not regret trying.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Truly it is Magic
Comment: I was advised to purchase this program by a seasoned genealogist. It has a multitude of features, some of which I have not had experience with as of yet. It can sort a large number of people to unique data bases. Overall, I am very happy with the product, however, if you need to call the tech help for this product good luck! The support is surely, grumpy, and rude! They expect everyone to be IT savy! He was impatient when I asked him to guide me through my problem step by step. I do not have a computer background and their help screens often don't clarify how to solve a problem that I am having. It is a great product for the price...just don't count on having tech support!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A genealogy program with the historian in mind
Comment: I have been doing genealogy for over 15 years, and started out with very rudimentary versions of Family Tree Maker. I was never happy with FTM's management of sources -- it seemed to be much more interested in how to make things "pretty" and sources, the heart and soul of real genealogy, always got short shrift.
Then, some years ago, I switched to Heritage Family Tree. I loved this program, even though it could be quite klunky in many ways and the charting software that came with the program was always cumbersome and often crashed. However, its source handling was the best out there, able to format and sort sources in such a way that source information could be entered completely and formatted well. It had other good built in features that I really liked.
However, they stopped supporting it, and although it was supposed to work with Windows XP, I experienced so many crashes with XP that I knew I had to start finding an alternative. The death knell came with Vista, and HFTD wouldn't even boot up under Vista. And then it turned out that their GEDCOM exporter dropped a LOT of information out of the source material I'd so painstakingly entered.
I had kept up with Family Tree Maker, and they came out with a new version. I decided to try to salvage what was left of my old family tree (over 2500 individuals and cannibalized source material that dropped half the information, cry!). However, this version (FTM 2008) is absolutely awful; the interface is about as far a departure from logical data entry, it doesn't do a lot of basic charts, and it is just so terribly bloated with crap I will never use that I knew I had to find an alternative. On someone's recommendation, I decided to check out RootsMagic.
After downloading the trial version, I was hooked almost immediately. It's simple, streamlined, and has fantastic source handling. When you enter a source, you're given the option to choose Source Wizard; normally I hate wizards, but this one gives a nice interface for inputting different types of sources (census, death/birth/marriage certificates, books, interviews, etc) in such a way that they are uniform and formatted for footnotes.
One feature I really like is the ability to add a married couple in a census together as "Census (family)". This eliminates the need to enter identical census information on two people in a family. I do wish they would extend this to the ability to select multiple members of a family, so you could enter both parents and children with one click. I realize that children did not always appear on a census with parents (I have a lot of cases where teenage boys worked on other farms), but a dialogue that would let you choose other members of the family to add to a census would reduce input errors and time. However, there is a handy "Memorize" function for sources, so it's easy to paste the same source into multiple entries. It's the next best thing.
It has built-in to-dos, so as you're entering family members and need to remember to do something, you can input a to-do related to that individual or family. This feature includes prioritization, date opened, date last worked on, date closed, and a place to add notes.
Like any new program it takes a little getting used to, but I find myself able to move easily among individuals and families. The Search feature is particularly nice because it includes not only the name of the individual, but also the birth and death dates so you can see which one you are selecting before you do so. This is handy in cases where you have more than one person with the same name and no middle initials to distinguish them.
Backup is simple; it archives a ZIP file of your day's work onto any external media you choose. Instead of overwriting the whole file every time, it only overwrites an existing file if you've changed it on the same day. Otherwise, it saves them incrementally, so you have the version you worked on last week archived as well as the one you are working on this way. This way, if something disastrous happens, like you discover that the 200 relatives you spent the last week painstakingly putting in are actually not related to you at all, or you accidentally replace all instances of "Gary, Lake, Indiana" with "Inverness, Citrus, Florida", you can roll back to a version without the mistakes.
The program is simple, straightforward, great for the historian. It's not as cute and sexy as some other, more bloated genealogy programs, but it does everything a serious genealogical researcher needs it to do and a little more besides. And you can't beat the price.
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