Family Tree Maker 2012 World Edition (PC): Amazon.co.uk: Software

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Product details

Product Description

Manufacturer's Description

Share your unique heritage
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Everyone has a family. Every family has a story. Family Tree Maker® 2012 World Edition can help you find yours!

With exciting new features to help you, Ancestry.co.uk™ Family Tree Maker® 2012 makes it easier than ever to discover your family story, preserve your legacy and share your unique heritage. And now, Family Tree Maker® 2012 World Edition provides the most extensive access to worldwide records, plus tools to create your own website and keep all your precious memories safe.

Interactive Training Tutorials give you step-by-step instructions, and hints & tips to help build your tree and you can also join Ancestry.co.uk's online community where you can find and share information with others.

3D utilities
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Family Tree Maker® 2012 lets you easily:

Research and preserve your family story on your computer.
Create charts and reports to share with family and friends - View and share your tree from different perspectives: location, migration path, family name and more.
Integrate 7 billion global records on Ancestry.co.uk™ and download new information directly into your tree.
Receive hints linking you to matching records on Ancestry.co.uk™
Add photos, documents, audio and video into your tree.
View timelines and interactive maps highlighting events and places in your ancestors' lives.
Write Smart Stories™ that automatically update when facts in your tree change. Features improved content generation and editing options.
Synchronise desktop and online Ancestry.co.uk™ family trees with the NEW TreeSync™ feature.

Plus! EXCLUSIVE to the WORD EDITION:

Access to Ancestry.co.uk's™ global record collections - including UK, Eire, Australia, Canada, USA, Europe and more, to help you trace your family tree worldwide. Even become part of the global Ancestry Community to share information, post queries and share tips.
Backup & Protect Software - Keep all your valuable photos, records, documents and certificates safe.
Create your Own Website Software - Create your own website to share your family tree and keep in touch with family members across the world.

Save to your desktop
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Family Tree Maker® 2012 features a host of new and exciting ways to discover your family story:

Follow the Hints - Just enter what you know into your family tree. Hints (green leaf icons) will soon appear, linking you to historical records and trees that might hold answers about your ancestors.

Save to your desktop - Saves information you discover on Ancestry.co.uk™ to your family tree, complete with an electronic copy of the original record.

Maps and Timelines - View maps to see where your ancestors have lived and track your family's migration paths. And, highlight key events that have occurred in their lives.

Share your tree with other family members
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IMPROVED - Manage photos and more - Add photos, audio and video files, documents etc. into your tree. Easy-to-use tools help you manage them faster than ever before!

IMPROVED - Smart Stories™. Write Smart Stories™ in two easy steps using improved page designs and templates. Each time you edit your tree, Smart Stories update automatically.

IMPROVED - Charts and Reports. Choose from hundreds of customisable chart options and create reports that let you see and share your tree from different perspectives - location, migration path, family name, birthdays and more!

NEW - Blended Families View. See combined families including step families and adoptees at a glance.

NEW TREE SYNC™ - Build your tree using Family Tree Maker® and upload it to Ancestry.co.uk™. Whether you're working online or on your desktop, you can keep your tree in sync with just the click of a button (and even update it using our FREE iPhone and iPad apps.). Share your tree with other family members and choose who can view and update it.

INCLUDES A 6 MONTH WORLDWIDE MEMBERSHIP TO ANCESTRY.CO.UK™ WORTH OVER £113††!

Explore millions of fascinating records and delve into your family's past. Who will you discover? Ancestry.co.uk™ is the UK's favourite family history website. New records are constantly being added, so there are always new discoveries waiting for you. Search our records, start your family tree and we'll help you uncover your ancestors' stories.

6 Months 'Worldwide' Membership
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Family Tree Maker 2012® WORLD EDITION includes 6 months 'WORLDWIDE' Membership to Ancestry.co.uk™. Perfect for family historians with ancestors in other countries and where your family history journey will take you overseas. Enjoy unlimited access to Ancestry.co.uk's entire global record collection including UK, Ireland, Australia, Canada and the USA. From embarkation papers to immigrations documents and slave registers - if we have records, you can view them - wherever in the world you are!

Your 6 Month 'Worldwide' Membership gives you access to:

Unlimited access to our entire library of over 7 billion records
Guaranteed access to all our new releases
Emigration records from America, Canada, Australia and more
Overseas consensus, electoral rolls and birth, marriage and death records
Exclusive UK parish, military and immigration records
The UK census records from 1841 - 1911
Plus, all our other worldwide records

Backup and Protect
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Backup and Protect Your Precious Memories

As you embark on your family history journey, you'll start to gather valuable information about your ancestors, including family photos, video clips, certificates and records, e-mails, music etc. Backup and Protect ensures that your PC and everything on it, is fully protected against disaster!

Safeguard valuable digital belongings from system crashes, virus infections and hard drive failures.
Automatic scheduling takes the hassle out of remembering to backup.
Backup to CD, DVD, USB drives, separate partitions, hard drive or network.

Create your own Website
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Create your own Family Tree Website

One of the most rewarding parts of researching your family history is sharing the results with family and friends. Using Create your own Website, you can create your very own customised family website with a domain name and 14 days free web hosting all included!

Connect your family members from all over the world and stay in touch with loved ones.
Share photos, video clips, family recipes, stories, special moments and memories.
Fully customisable with no web design experience or html programming required!

Step-by-step instructions
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You'll also get:

Interactive Family Tree Maker® Training Tutorials
Get step-by-step instructions, hints & tips to help you build and grow your family tree

Quick Start Guide for Family Tree Maker® 2012 (Electronic Version)
Get started with the basics of using the software

Companion Guide to Family Tree Maker® (400 page Printed Version)
Learn Family Tree Maker's most popular features with quick lessons that make research fast and fun.

PLUS, we've teamed up with some of the UK's best-known genealogy companies to bring you a host of fantastic offers designed to help with your family history journey! You'll find a subscription offer for Your Family Tree Magazine, money-off Living Relative Search and some great discounts on genealogical archive folders & storage boxes, Cassini family history maps and Hall of Names heraldic gifts.+

Press awards

* Source NPD Techworld 31/5/09 - 1/8/10
†The Ancestry.co.uk™ 'Worldwide' Membership begins upon activation of the 6-month free subscription with a valid credit or debit card, but no money will be taken during the free subscription period. To ensure uninterrupted service, your membership will be automatically renewed at the end of the free subscription period for a further 6 months of paid subscription. To cancel your membership without incurring a charge to your credit or debit card, go to www.ancestry.co.uk, simply login and go to 'My Account', click on 'Cancel Subscription' at least 2 days before the free subscription is due to end, otherwise the full price of a 6-month 'Worldwide' membership will be automatically debited from your credit or debit card. Assuming that you do not cancel, at the end of the 6 months paid subscription period your membership will roll over into an annual membership that will automatically renew at the end of each year, unless you cancel before each renewal. Use of Ancestry.co.uk is subject to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy. See www.ancestry.co.uk for full details. †† Based on the price of a monthly Premium package subscription at Ancestry.co.uk™ as of 6th September 2011.

Product Description

FAMILY TREE MAKER WORLD 2012

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 55 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth the Money 19 Oct 2011

By Antaloorian

Amazon Verified Purchase

First thing that should be noted are the differences between FTM 2012 and FTM 2011:
1. Tree Sync
2. Combined Family View (If a person has children with more than one partner then all children can be displayed on the same screen - I've found it useful but it is quite a minor detail)
3. Improved Smart Stories (They are better than 2011's Smart Stories, but they still read like a machine has written them - I wouldn't bother!)
4. New report and chart options - haven't tried these yet.
5. New tutorials - haven't tried these yet.
Also, for those updating from FTM Version 16, then apparently it will detect that & display an interface that looks more like older versions of FTM.
And that's about it as far as changes go.

It comes in a very big box with a 370 page guide to FTM 2012 - it seems quite comprehensive, though I haven't read it all yet. It also has 3 discs:
1. FTM 2012
2. Backup and Protect, a program called Perfect Image, Version 12 (I can't comment on this as I haven't installed it. FTM 2010 World Edition came with Version 11 of the same program for those who are interested.)
3. Create Your Own Website (Web Easy 8, exactly the same version as in FTM 2010 World Edition)

Installation on Windows 7 was straightforward and reasonably quick, but be aware that if you have a previous version of FTM on your computer the new installation will automatically convert your Family Tree Maker files to the latest version.

When you start the program, the Plan screen is the most different as it has a box for Tree Sync. Most other views look very similar to last year's version.
Tree Sync is the big difference as it allows you to update your tree and will automatically or manually make the changes on your Ancestry family tree.... It can't sync a tree that already exists though, you have to upload a tree to Ancestry again for it to work. Compared to some, my tree is quite small - about 400 names, 200 media / reference files - and it took just a few minutes for the tree data to upload, about an hour for all the media to be uploaded too. I decided not to have the automatic sync turned on, prefering to manually sync my trees, I've done it several times and the whole process has been smooth and quick. Of course, you don't have to link your tree on Ancestry should you wish not to. I'm really pleased with the process though.

If all you want the program for is simply to update from 2011 to 2012 then it's probably not worth the money for the World Edition. However if, as I did, you want it because it's a cheap way of getting a world Ancestry subscription, then it is excellent value for money.

Update (30/10/2011):
One of the things I like about Family tree Maker is that the software comes with two licences - I can install it on my laptop as well as my desktop. I have done that as I was away for a week. I keep my family tree on a portable hard drive - it's just a case of plugging the drive into whichever machine I happen to be using. When I started it up on my laptop though, the family tree came up as not uploaded or synchronised to Ancestry. Rather than worry about that, I just worked on my tree, then when I next used my desktop, I synchronised all my changes without any problems.

Update (03/12/2011:
Had a hard drive failure on my computer so had to replace it and re-install everything including FTM 2012. My family tree is kept on an external disk and I open it from there, but when I opened it on the re-installed program it didn't recognise it as linked to the Ancestry tree any more. Having been in touch with Ancestry's support, it appears that there is no way to re-link it. I'll have to go throught the whole process of uploading the tree & media again, as well as re-inviting all the people I had given access and, to avoid confusion, I'll delete the old tree. This is a major flaw as far as I can see, and one that will need fixing. It's enough for me to knock a star off, but the program is still woth buying if you need the subscription to Ancestry. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother upgrading now. Read more ›

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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A mixed bag but still an unbeatable genealogy tool 24 Nov 2011

By Stephen C TOP 50 REVIEWER VINE™ VOICE

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Before I begin, it might be useful to know that I have been an amateur genealogist for a few years, and have used several versions of Family Tree Maker (FTM). This is the top-of-the-range package from Ancestry, giving you access to all of its 7 billion historical records. The package comprises three items of software and a printed copy of The Companion Guide. However, the biggest bonus in the package is the six-month free subscription to Ancestry: the subscription is the main attraction. It gives access to all of Ancestry's overseas birth, marriage and death records, census records, parish records, immigration records, and so on. This is a fantastic resource if you have overseas ancestors (as a surprising number of families do). Obviously, if you are searching German census records they will all be in German, so you will need to understand some key words and phrases if you are to extract all the information available to you.

FTM comes with every package in the FTM range. It is the same software no matter which package you go for. It aims to provide everything you need to create your family tree. Its search tools and a few other features link very closely with the Ancestry website. While you are making use of the free six-month subscription to Ancestry, it all integrates very well. When your free subscription period has expired, if you don't want to continue with a new subscription, then all is not lost. The package still works fine; you just won't benefit from its web-based features. However, you do still get to use TreeSync to synchronize your family tree with a copy of it kept on the website. More about that later.
Of course, genealogy information comes from a huge array of sources, so don't worry about being tied to Ancestry.... In my case, I get most information from non-Ancestry sources, such as local archives, visiting cemeteries, talking to relatives, trawling newspaper archives, and so on. But for those must-have essentials like census and military records, Ancestry is a vital resource.

If you have used earlier FTM then this one adds nothing much to FTM 2011, which I reviewed at length here on Amazon. The 2012 version adds the following:
Blended Families View. It sits below the tree view, and provides details about the selected person, their spouse and children. If the family has children from different relationships, you may also view all of them together in this view.
SmartStories. This has been updated to allow you to include facts about an individual and his or her family in one view. This makes the feature rather more powerful. If you are not familiar SmartStories, the feature takes facts about a person, and converts them into readable paragraphs of text. I don't find it very useful for genealogical purposes, but it does make it easier to put together a book about the family tree.

Ahnentafel and descendent reports now generate descriptive fact sentences for each fact or event. As with SmartStory, this puts facts into readable sentences.

There are a few minor updates in charts, and some icons for controlling certain panels, but that's about it for this upgrade.
TreeSync. This is a real plus. You probably know that you can upload your family tree to the Ancestry website, so that you can work on it online wherever you are, have a handy backup, and of course share it with other people (or not as the case may be). TreeSync keeps the online and local (on your computer) copies of your family tree synchronized. For example, if you have added a fact to your online family tree, TreeSync makes sure that your local copy is updated accordingly. It's a great idea. If you happen to have an iPhone and t5he Ancestry app, TreeSync works with that, too.

No software package will make your family tree for you. You cannot just click a button and hey-presto your great aunt Doris Jones appears. Genealogy research simply isn't like that. Where FTM is wonderful is in providing a very handy relational database for entering, collating, error-checking, handling and presenting the huge amount of information you may collect about individuals in your family tree.

"Create Your Own Website" (aka "WebEasy 8") provides an easy way to create a website. It does indeed do that, but it has a huge hole in it when it comes to working with FTM.
(1) It provides no way to grab information from FTM and build web pages with it. This makes it almost useless in an FTM package.
(2) It has no "HTML Import" feature! That's right - a website building package that does not support HTML import! To get HTML import you have to upgrade at a cost of �19.14 (at time of writing) to WebEasy Professional. This means that you can make HTML reports in FTM but you can't import them. I am absolutely STAGGERED that a website building package could omit this feature. I mean, it's like building a kitchen and omitting the hob.

Thus, any family tree information you want to put into your website you will have to type in or copy/paste manually. As a professional author with 26 years of experience with all kinds of publishing software, this is completely unacceptable. If I were serious about making a family tree website, I would not use this software to do it. It's a huge let-down to me, because it's actually a good package. It's just hopelessly hamstrung by having no link to all that data locked up inside FTM.

"Backup and Protect" (aka "Perfect Image 12") is a backup package for your computer - not just for your family tree. Anyway, it includes 32-bit and 64-bit versions; the one you install depends on whether your version of Windows is 32-bit or 64-bit. It is aimed at non-technical users, and as such its features are easy to understand and use. If you are not very knowledgeable about computers then I recommend you read the help, so you understand some of the terminology. It can make the usual kind of backup copies, incremental backups, and it can mirror drives, too. (A mirror is essentially an exact copy of a disk drive and absolutely everything on it) in case you need to restore the entire system.

Ignoring "WebEasy" (awful), and "Perfect Image" (fine but nothing really to do with FTM or genealogy) what you get is FTM and access to an absolutely vast collection of historical records. If your genealogy research has taken you to overseas records, then it is almost unbeatable value. Read more ›

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Very useful software for family history fans 20 Jan 2012

By Sue H TOP 1000 REVIEWER VINE™ VOICE

Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Family Tree Maker software is produced by Avenquest. The box contains 3 CDs:- Family Tree Maker (FTM) , Back up and protect your pc, and Create your own web site. The FTM is linked to Ancestry who provide subscription or credit access to online global historical records. The software comes with 6 months free access to Ancestry world wide membership (currently worth ~�112) Having used several previous versions of this software it is highly recommended for those starting out in family history research, it can be used on a very simple level, but also has the capacity to handle large amounts of complex information.

One relatively new feature is the ability to sync your offline FTM tree with and online version. If you already have a recent version of FTM then this new version does not seem to offer a lot over previous versions, but I believe upgrade packages are available which may make the cost worthwhile.

There is a 350 page guide to using the software, help functions within the programme and online help from Ancestry for subscribers.

The software installation prompts you to register which is usually irritating and not a feature I like however chances are you will want to access the Ancestry online records so this was ok.

You can then start with a new file and type in names/detsails e.g. mother or father, or you can import an existing file or download a file from the ancestry web site. If you choose the latter there is the option to link a tree to one uploaded to ancestry and keep them synchronised. This is helpful as you can then work on your tree off line.... Read more ›

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