Family Tree Maker 10 Collector's Edition

There is really no way to tie together all of the documentation that I have and there are no real research aids. All this software lets you do is take the results of all of your research and keep it in a computer.

Not so exciting, but still better than most on the market.

In trying to get you to switch from Family Origins to FTM, they tell you, "Your Family Origins data imports accurately into Family Tree Maker via the GEDCOM format." I found this not completely true. I have run into serious problems in porting data from Family Origins to FTM. So far, I have found that key words are dropped from custom facts, long notes are truncated, and suffixes such as "Jr." are dropped from names. In addition, notes that Family Origins associated with facts are disassociated from the facts and dropped into the person's general Notes bucket, so that these notes lose their contexts, and many of them no longer make sense. And I expect to find more problems, as I have only begun sifting through the 1,197 warnings and error messages generated during the import. Another case of false advertising for FTM, to echo a charge made by other reviewers.

A number of customers on FTM's own message boards recommend migrating from Family Origins to RootsMagic. RootsMagic is supposedly done by the same people who did Family Origins.

On the other hand, this program is easy to use and produces nice reports and graphics, even better output than from Family Origins.

I'm surprised at the bitterness in other reviews regarding the CDs. I'm not so disappointed with the CDs, maybe because I wasn't expecting much from them anyway. If you rely heavily on CDs, you'll have to look at an awful lot of CDs to find many direct hits on your ancestors. In this set, I find several CDs interesting. Not bad.

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