Great information Kathy, I hope you gave this to Ancestry for
improvement feedback!
Adair
On Nov 12, 2010, at 1:13 PM, Kathy Cardoza wrote:
I have used many genealogy programs over the years, both for Macs
and for PCs and own several for both platforms. Reunion (Mac) has
generally been my program of choice, though, as it is generally a
very fine program, thorough, and easy to work with. I am always
intrigued by trying out new programs, looking for that "perfect"
one. To that end, I recently purchased FTM for the Mac and have
been working with it this last week. This is not a complete review,
but is only my first impressions of the program, both pro and con.
I hope it will be helpful to you if you are considering purchasing it.
First of all, there are two versions of this program ..... One, for
$69 is sold directly from Ancestry http://store.ancestry.com/
ProductDetail.aspx?P=P-4845. The other version sells for $99 but
includes a Toolkit of 6 PDF books that may or may not be helpful to
you. It also includes a 6 month membership to the U.S. collection
on Ancestry. Before I purchased mine, I called Ancestry to find out
if I could apply that additional 6 months to my current Ancestry
subscription and was told Yes. I purchased my copy at Office Max,
but it is also sold at Best Buy, Office Depot, Amazon, and Apple
stores. After I purchased and registered it, I called Ancestry and
they added 6 months to my subscription. That, alone, is worth the
additional $30, in my opinion!
I first prepared a gedcom in Reunion of my 9,000+ individuals and
imported it into FTM. That process went very smoothly and quick. As
most everyone knows (or should know) gedcom is NOT a perfect
process, nor do you get perfect results. This was no exception.
(Also, because I store my genealogy files in Dropbox and share them
with both my computers, I changed the default place FTM wanted to
put my file, to my Dropbox.)
The program feels pretty Mac-like, in general. One thing I noticed
right off, though, was that, after the import, I clicked the button
to View the Log..... and it opened up Parallels on my Mac to go
into the Windows XP System that I run on my Mac! Oops....Not very
Mac friendly there and bad first impression. :)
Gedcom import: Generally, most things were handled very well in
the import. Notable exceptions were that many of my Misc. Event
tags in Reunion (gedcom tag was EVEN) did not survive the import.
Those included events such as Illness, Accident, Surgery, Register
to Vote, and Fraternal Society Joined........ events that I added
myself into Reunion and had given the EVEN gedcom tag. When I
realized this, I had to mark those individuals in Reunion and add
those Facts (as FTM calls them) into FTM one by one. I am still in
the process of doing this but am getting close to being finished
with it.
Notes: I use quite a few Notes in Reunion and have added my own
with the gedcom tag of NOTE; Census (where I record the entire
household for each census), Probate, and Military as well as the
default one for each individual of Misc. Notes. It seems that only
one Note was imported for each person so if they had a Military
note, for example, you will have to manually add that into FTM as
part of your Military Fact for that person.
Facts: FTM calls everything a Fact. There is a very large Note
field attached to each Fact. I do not know if there is a character
limit to this field as there is in Reunion (which is rather small).
It is a very large field for adding data so there is plenty of room
to add in your Note data from Reunion. When you publish a report
such as an Individual Person Report, these Fact Notes don't appear
immediately below the Fact data (date and place) but instead are
gathered at the end of the report. I didn't like that at first,
preferring to have ALL the pertinent data including the Memo/Note,
all together with the event data. But, after working with this for
a while, I see the merits of having that Note data appear at the
end of the report (before Sources, if you choose to include them).
You have an uncluttered view of all the Facts (Events) in a
person's life, shown as a concise list at the beginning of the
report. It makes it easy to view those events but if you want more
info on each one, you can refer to the end of the report where that
data appears.
Sources: FTM has a set of templates included for adding specific
source types. I haven't done a lot of these so far so I can't
really give you much feedback on it as of yet. At first glance,
though, it seems to be somewhat limited for templates. The Source
View, though, is very complete. You can click on one of your
sources on the left side and immediately see all the source
citation detail as well as the links (the people or event it is
being used on) and the media attached to it. Very nice! You can
also rate your sources with a built-in criteria that asks you quick
questions about the source to assign it a gold star rating OR you
can choose your own blue star rating based on criteria of your own
choosing and there is a place to add your Justification notes for
your reasons.
Media: I chose to import my Media links from Reunion into FTM.
What that means is that the links all appear in FTM, but not the
images (photos, documents, audio, video, etc.). This forces you to
click on each Media link in the Media view. When you double click
to open it, you are presented with the choice of YOU searching for
the media file or letting FTM search for it. FTM does it much
faster than I could locate the file, even knowing exactly where it
is. FTM takes only 3 or 4 seconds to find the file so the process
goes fairly quickly. Then, you can assign a category to the item
(built in are Photo, Census, Document and a few others.... you can
add your own, if you wish), add a date and description, add a note,
and (most importantly) assign a link to the media file of a person
or the actual event, or both. Depending on how many media items you
have, this can be a long and tedious process. I am still working on
mine .... but I'm almost finished with it. There is no provision
that I can see, to link more than one individual at a time to a
media file (for instance, linking both the bride and groom to a
marriage record.) You can link both, but you have to do it
separately. That process could be much improved upon in future
upgrades!
Places: I love this feature! You have a list of all your places
and when you select one, you are very quickly awarded with a map of
that area ...... even our Azores! You also get a list of all the
people who are "attached" to that place with a little arrow that
when clicked, shows you what event(s) of theirs occurred there.
Very nice! Also, you can choose to view people in the Places view.
When you click on a person, you see a list of their events on the
right. You can check off the events you want to add to your map.
Then, you get a migration map for that individual. It shows their
path with whatever events you choose to add. You can export this in
several ways as a PDF to show their path but it does not indicate
each individual place along the way by a push pin or label. Nice,
but could be improved upon.
Publish: The reports and charts in FTM seem to be very good as
they are well known for. I was disappointed not to find an
Individual Narrative Report. But, there are ways to work around
that .... one is to create a different type of report for one
generation, such as an Ahnentafel Report. That gives you the
details of a person's life in narrative form that you can edit
later. One thing I looked for and did not find, was a way to save a
reports options for future use. Charts and Reports, though, look
very interesting and I look forward to playing around them more in
the future.
Web Search: I haven't used this a great deal yet, instead choosing
to focus my time and attention to cleaning up my data from the
import, creating my media links, etc. First things first! It does
look very interesting, though, and I look forward to trying it out.
My Wishes: There seems to be no way to Mark or Flag people like
you can do in Reunion ... wish that was an option. (However, if you
want to export a gedcom from FTM and choose Selected Individuals,
you are presented with a selection window to select a person and
all their ancestors, descendants, or other options ..... not as
much control over the process as I would like.) I have not found
where you can view the actual gedcom tags for the Facts or be able
to edit those or the sentence structure that appears in certain
reports so that you have more control over those....wish that was
an option. I have not found anywhere that you can use the normal
Mac behavior of command+click or shift+click to select more than
one item... that could be added and would be most welcome. These
items are not a "deal breaker" for me; they may be for you. But,
they are things I would certainly like to see added or improved
upon in the future.
In summary, I am really getting to like this program! It has a lot
to offer and I can only hope that they continue to develop it and
add new features as they go along with its development. I am still
getting used to the interface, but I find that I like it. It is
clean, attractive, informative with lots of options everywhere you
look in the form of tabs, buttons, and popups. And, it is very easy
to navigate through your family file. On the Family tab of the
Person view, you can view the Index, Bookmarks, and History. The
program feels very quick and responsive. There are a few areas that
could be improved upon, to be sure...... giving the user more
control is a big one....., and I look forward to hopefully seeing
those improvements in the future. Meanwhile, I'm going to spend
more and more time exploring the program and plan to use it side by
side with Reunion for the time being. As I discover more about it,
who knows? I may decide to make it my main program...... or not.
Time will tell but I do so enjoy the journey! :)
Kathy
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Visit the Azores GenWeb Project:
http://homepage.mac.com/kmacardoza/Genealogy/azoresindex.html
Climb my Family Tree:
http://homepage.mac.com/kmacardoza/Genealogy/Kathy/index.htm
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