Family Historian V3

Charts and Diagrams

Instantly create Ancestor, Descendant, Hourglass and Everyone diagrams, as well as Family Historian's unique All Relatives diagrams. Diagrams are tightly integrated and used for browsing, exploring and editing as well as for creating superb wall charts. Click-and-drag to add relatives. Print diagrams at any scale or orientation. All diagrams are fully configurable and most options can be changed on-the-fly.

Smart Trees
Family Historian's smart trees give you unprecedented control over chart layout: hide, show, move, resize and re-order boxes and branches, and watch as trees automatically adjust themselves to reflect your changes.

Unrivalled Support for Pictures and Multimedia
Add as many pictures as you like for each person. You can add a picture once and link it to each person in the picture. You can even link each person to their own face in the picture, and show just faces in diagrams or reports, without having to 'crop' your pictures. No other Windows genealogy program supports anything like this and yet it is really an essential feature if you wish to work with pictures. You can also add sounds, video and any other kind of multimedia. You can even add links to other family tree files.

Create Stylish Websites and Family Tree CDs
Creating great-looking websites, or family tree CDs, is easy using Family Historian's powerful wizards, which have all the flexibility and options you need.

A Powerful and Sophisticated Query Engine
A 'query' allows you to extract whatever data you want from your family tree file. Family Historian comes with a set of standard queries, but you can easily create your own, to get whatever information you want from your own data. Every query can be displayed in a spreadsheet-like grid, printed as a report, output to a file, or copied to the clipboard for easy transfer to other programs (such as a word-process or spreadsheet). Queries can also be used in other ways. For example, if you wished to split a family tree file you could use a query to define the split. You can also run a query to select pictures to view (e.g. show me all pictures of the female descendants of X).

Reports
Family Historian comes with 28 fully-featured and highly configurable reports (in addition to query reports see previous paragraph). Reports include narrative reports, outline reports, summary reports, complete-record reports, the Family Group Sheet and more. All reports can be saved as web pages or as word-processor documents. Create custom report types using any existing report as a template.

100% GEDCOM
GEDCOM is the global standard format for shared genealogical data; but applications vary significantly in how well they support it. Family Historian is, we believe, unique in being 100% GEDCOM compatible, and 100% GEDCOM complete. '100% GEDCOM compatible' means that Family Historian can save all of its data to the GEDCOM format. In fact, Family Historian uses GEDCOM as its own native file format. '100% GEDCOM complete' means that Family Historian can load all records and fields (or tags as they are called in GEDCOM) from a GEDCOM file including other applications' extensions to GEDCOM. You might think that 100% completeness is the least you should expect; but it is not what you usually get. We know of no other family tree application that comes close. Other applications simply discard records and fields that they cannot load. Some will tell you when they do this. Some won't.

Excellent Support for Sources
Where did you get your information from? It's a very good idea to record not just the facts, but where the information came from your sources. Your data will be much more useful to you, and valuable to others, if you know this. Family Historian makes it easy to record your sources with its automatic source citations. Copy and paste citations, and see at a glance the sources for each item of data.

A Unique Merge/Compare Facility
Only Family Historian lets you compare any two GEDCOM files side-by-side so that you can see exactly where and how they differ, and how they will end up when merged, before you commit yourself to any of it. You have complete control over the merge process. As well as files, you can also compare and merge duplicated branches, and duplicated records.

Events & Attributes
With Family Historian you can record full details of any events or attributes, in the lives of the individuals or families in your files. Family Historian comes with a large number of standard events and attributes for you to select from (birth, death, baptism, marriage, divorce, etc), but you can easily create any new ones that you need. Now in version 3 you can even install entire sets of fact definitions created by others (e.g. for recording data about specialist topics such as medical or military history); or you can create your own 'fact sets' and export them for others to install and use.

Notes & Documents
You can have as many notes as you like about each individual in your family tree file (in addition to notes relating to specific events or attributes). Often, in practice, when an individual marries, you will wish to make notes that apply both to them and to their spouse. Sometimes you will wish to write notes that apply to a number of individuals. Family Historian supports all of these scenarios. It also allows you to see at a glance, and read, all the notes that are relevant to a given individual and, of course, provide source citations for all of them. But if a note is not enough, you can also link your records to entire documents, written using your preferred word-processor, which you can store separately or embed in your family tree file.

No Limits
Each user can have an unlimited number of spouses, children, sets of parents, pictures, multimedia, notes, source citations, and so on. You can store multiple, possibly conflicting versions of most items of data, such as names, dates, places, etc.; and you can assess the reliability of each version.

Technical Support
As well as direct email support, Family Historian users have access to free website or email-based forums where you can get advice and tips from expert users, and from the publishers.

Ease of Use
Family Historian is not only very easy to use it is also fun to use (Computeractive called it a dream to use). It has an innovative user interface that finds new ways to let the user explore and browse their family tree data.