Family Historian Review by Pat,  Apr 28, 2013

Love this programme and I find it really easy to use. Its particular strength is the way it handles photographs. I haven’t really explored the new plugins on the new version but they look interesting. Couple of niggles-perhaps a field for an individual’s military service would be good. However I have just converted to a Mac and despite trying to run it through special software it has become unstable. Please, please can we have a Mac version.

Biggest Pro: I find it really easy to use with so many great features
Biggest Con: There is no Mac version

Family Historian Review by Gabrielle Baker,  Apr 27, 2013

I chose Family Historian due to it’s claims of Gedcom handling as well as the queries and the dropline trees. I have upgraded twice now but what has been a minor annoyance has now become a major one, and other problems have now reared their heads as well. If you have multiple ancestors that are descended from a single common ancestor in the charts these are denoted by the common ancestor being duplicated with arrow between each instance denoting the link. The FH die hards in the user group think this is a real advantage but I find it a major annoyance. Some of it can be averted by better tree design. If you end up with a lot of aristocracy or even royalty in your tree the resulting charts can be impossible to look at. I am having to consider having to buy another program in order to get better charting capabilities. I have already had to fork out for another genealogy program for my ipad and iphone as they dont have an app yet. My other pet gripe is to do with how it handles names and titles (though I think this is true of all geneaolgy programs) the capabilities around names and titles of royalty, aristocracy and medieval ancestors is severely limited. yes you can use custom fields but using the title and or custom fields does not override what was put in the standard name field, so if you have a run of ancestors all of the same name say Joe Brown that’s all you will see in the index of persons in the database or printed on a tree.

Biggest Pro: Gedcom handling
Biggest Con: tree drawings where there multiple common ancestors

Family Historian Review by Jan Ledochowski,  Apr 27, 2013

My review depends completely on whether or not you can use foreign language fonts. As you know in Windows computers you can set up languages like EN, FR or PL (Polish) so you just choose the relevant icon and you are typing in that language. Before buying I was told that you could use foreign language fonts, but so far I have not been able to discover how to use them. As many of my relatives are Polish inability to type their names in correctly would kill this programme for me!

Biggest Pro: Have not really started due to font problem
Biggest Con: Does not (yet?) cope with foreign language fonts

Family Historian Review by Dave Tomlinson,  Mar 18, 2013

I have used this program for a number of years. I bought it for its GEDCOM compliance but you would never believe that the data is not held in a fancy relational database. You never need to enter, or update, data in more than one place. The reporting features are amazing. It is hard to think of nything I want that the program does not provide ‘out-of-the-box’.
Version 5 has introduced plug-ins which are tiny additions that are free to download and add functionality to be dreamed of. My favourite is the Census Checker. It asks for a starting person, or persons, and produces a webpage list of all the ancestors who have not had census records created for all the censuses when they were alive. The webpage includes two links with each record which connect to the search engines at FindMyPast and Ancestry. Click the link and another tab opens for the search for the right person in the right census (I haven’t tried the Ancestry link but the FMP one works perfectly)
If I find another problem I can’t solve a quick email to the very friendly user group will tell me how or someone will offer to write another plug-in or maybe Simon Orde will tell me why the problem can’t be solved. The last usually means that the problem is in my head.
There is an additional program called Ancestral Sources (FREE) which guides you through entering a Census entry, a baptism record, and a marriage certificate (birth certificates, death, burial and probate records are planned). These things can easily be done ‘by hand’ but the program reminds you to fill in ALL the data available and it creates occupation and residence records and birth records, when necessary. It also creates source records and citations.

My family history would be much less well organised and very much less well recorded without Family Historian.

Biggest Pro: It can do anything I can imagine needing.
Biggest Con: I don’t think it has one.

Family Historian Review by Colin,  Jan 7, 2013

I use this programme for my One-Name study.

It has a different but intuitive interface that makes data entry easy. With the plug-ins such as Find Duplicates and Ancestral Sources it makes keeping my data clean easy to do. Ancestral Sources is what turned me on to Family Historian and now I won’t use anything else. The ability to run queries against the database to get exactly the report that you need is great too.

Highly recommended

Family Historian Review by Shelagh Boardman,  Jan 3, 2012

Very easy to use as a basic family tree builder, and also to progress in as an advanced user. The ability to personalise templates to make narrative reports “flow” as a story is a huge bonus, as is the ability to create your own templates and own queries. The user group is also extremely helpful, as is the user group web site, I can’t think why it wasn’t number 1.

Biggest Pro: Flexibility and narrative reporting
Biggest Con: messy upgrading from early versions

Family Historian Review by Alan Hourd,  Jan 3, 2012

Easily the best program available. It can be used without much effort at the most basic level but can also accomplish the most complex of tasks with just a little effort involved.

Biggest Pro: Excellent support and user group
Biggest Con: Upgrading gets a bit complicated if you start with a very early version.

Family Historian Review by Martin Allen,  Jan 2, 2012

For sheer range of what it will do, this is unparallelled

Biggest Pro: Range, excellent support
Biggest Con: None

Family Historian Review by Ken Toll,  Jan 2, 2012

Version 4 does everything I need - and them some.
‘haven’t tried ‘v 5…
…yet.

Have used it to create the GedComs for my TNG site:
http://www.toll-familyhistory.org

Biggest Pro: works natively in GedCom
Biggest Con: upgrade to V5 ain’t free

Family Historian Review by Patricia Spray,  Oct 20, 2011

I’ve tried many Family History applications over many years. Once I tried Family Historian there was no going back. A bit harder to get to know than most, but well worth the effort.

Biggest Pro: Interactive charts
Biggest Con: Reports are not as good as other applications.

Family Historian Review by Jackie,  Jul 11, 2011

I use two genealogy programs - FamilyTreeMaker to make hard copy books because of it’s index of names feature and I use Family Historian for everything else. Love, love, love Family Historian! Some reviews below site a steep learning curve, I didn’t find it so bad at all. Family Historian has terrific features - multi-media handling is superb, charts are fantastic, and the queries feature is outstanding. I am so pleased with Family Historian, that I often purchase copies to give as wedding presents!

Biggest Pro: Flexbility, reliability, great user group.
Biggest Con: Accompanying index of names feature for hard copy book printing.

Family Historian Review by Adrian Bruce,  Jan 23, 2011

Yes, it does have a steep learning curve - but so does virtually anything powerful. I found the user interface very natural - someone likened it once to MS Office (pre-ribbon) in its style of dialog boxes. I typically bring up a family tree diagram for someone and work from there, double clicking on the person to edit their details.
Resulting charts are great and the computer produced narrative report is acceptable - though still clearly machine produced.
The query language is powerful (see previous comment about learning curve) but it’s easy enough to concoct a query to list (say) all burials in a location to use as a hit list looking for MIs.
Don’t understand the comment earlier about size of Notes - mine are huge.

Biggest Pro: Access to details in a natural way from the diagram
Biggest Con: Can enter any GEDCOM data but ability to display them _easilyand quickly_ is limited

Family Historian Review by Graham Dodd,  Aug 26, 2010

Great software but shame it is not produced in Mac I have become so fed-up with Microsoft despite using it since it was founded, that I have now purchased a Mac. Will buy CrossOver saftware to run FHv4 on Mac - Any body had experience of running FH over Mac via CrossOver.

Thanks

Biggest Pro: Flexible and can cater for beginners to professionals
Biggest Con: No Mac version

Family Historian Review by Patricia,  Aug 26, 2010

The best ever. I’ve used many different genealogy databases over my 40 years of genealogy research. Having tried Family Historian, I wouldn’t go back to any of the others. It does take a bit of learning, but when you get into it the queries are not as difficult as first thought. The charts are brilliant and the support the best ever. Navigation is excellent.

Biggest Pro: Great for getting an overall view of your tree.
Biggest Con: None that I can think of.

Family Historian Review by Roger Quick,  Apr 24, 2010

Family Historian is superb.
I used TMG, and tried various other programs over some years.
What I really wanted was a program which could display a tree diagram, and access individual records by clicking on the diagram.
FH does just that. Simple! For any individual I can with one click show their ancestors, or descendants, or both (hourglass tree), or all relatives. With or without pictures.

It has detailed facilities for data, research, input, and manipulation of data - lots of free add-ons from the users group, who play a really active role in suggesting developments - and these really do get listened to and incorporated in the next version.
I’m hoping to start a Family History club at my school. If I could get a slightly better deal for multiple copies than the one offered so far, I will certainly use FH.

One additional detail: without diminishing it’s usage for other ancestries, I have found FH to be far and away the best for data relating to UK families - especially when used with the additional (free) prog Gedcom Census.
And to be honest, I haven’t even (yet) upgraded to the latest version which came out earlier this year.
I can’t praise it highly enough.

Biggest Pro: Click-through diagrams to data
Biggest Con: Having to rack my brain here. Maybe more right-click functions; but for all I know that might be in the latest version.

Family Historian Review by Herman Munster,  Jan 30, 2010

This is a rather flexible program, with multiple ways of inputting data, and the diagram charts are a major asset. There’s a good many ways to customise the information, but it comes at a price, namely, you have to learn what amounts to a programming language for such things as custom fact sets and queries. It’s not intuitive as it could be, but within those limits, it’s a powerful program.

Unfortunately, it has an extremely steep learning curve, and the help file is out of date. The tutorials included with the program are of some help, but the whole thing is written as if you were a programmer, and not a beginner. The cost of the program is in the upper deck range of prices, but it’s probably worth it if you take the time to learn the program.

The support for the product is spotty at best; although the user groups tries to be helpful. They don’t always succeed, but they garner points for trying. After employing it for several months, I decided the program wasn’t for me and jumped ship elsewhere.

Biggest Pro: Flexibility, adherence to the GEDCOM standard.
Biggest Con: Price, very steep learning curve, spotty support.

Family Historian Review by Irene Blackburn,  Dec 6, 2009

I have used several programs over the years but I have bee using this one happily for some years now.

Biggest Pro: Easy to use, great user group
Biggest Con: some of the user group contributors

Family Historian Review by Lars J W Holm,  Feb 18, 2009

Very easy to work with.
Absolutely the best gedcom merge functions, also very easy to merge duplicates both persons and familys.

Biggest Pro: The merge functions
Biggest Con: Not multi language

Family Historian Review by Dr DBW,  Dec 31, 2008

Very powerful and flexible package. Many ways of doing things, such as navigating and adding information, so you do it the way you find easiest. GED file follows the standard, so no stupid errors when you send it to someone else to view / use. Looking forward to the new version, which will have improved image handing, which is already pretty good.

I tried a number of different packages, and this one stood out on top as the best one for me. Others look way to “gimicky”.

Biggest Pro: Very flexible and configurable to give what you want
Biggest Con: Provided tree outputs for display not really polished

Family Historian Review by Benjamin S. Beck,  Sep 29, 2008

Versatile, British based, strong basis in gedcom format. Some features struck me as not as intuitive as I’d like. Main reason I abandoned it and reverted to PAF was that there’s a limit on the size of the Notes field, and this limit is too small for my purposes.

Biggest Pro: Gedcom standard at the core of the program
Biggest Con: Limit to size of Notes field