Discover, Organize, and Share Your Family History

Family Tree Maker 2012 Overview Video

22 Oct 2011 by Leave a Comment

The accompanying video will show you the major elements of Family Tree Maker 2012. At its most basic, Family Tree Maker consists of the following workspaces.

  • Plan
  • People
  • Places
  • Media
  • Sources
  • Publish
  • Web Search

The workspaces group related features. They are made up of tabbed views and panels that you use to plan, research, analyze, preserve, and share your genealogy.

This video will give you a feel for how Family Tree Maker 2012 looks and operates. This is more helpful than for other genealogy software because there’s no trial version of FTM 2012.
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Index of Individuals Report in Family Tree Maker 2012

23 Sep 2011 by Leave a Comment

It’s hard to believe that a report of all individuals in your tree wasn’t already in Family Tree Maker! Ancestry has corrected this oversight in FTM 2012.

Now you can print a report listing the persons in your tree. It can be all of them, but doesn’t have to be.

You can make a report listing the immediate family of a person. The selected can be changed by using the pedigree navigation bar at the top of the screen.

The index of individuals report can also be made to list selected individuals. This works just like on other reports.

The report lists individuals in rows with their name and birth, marriage, and death dates in columns.
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Add an Existing Person as a Spouse in Family Tree Maker

18 Sep 2011 by 6 Comments

Adding a spouse in genealogy software Family Tree Maker is intuitive when it’s a person you haven’t yet added to your tree. What’s not intuitive is how to connect two people who are already in your tree. Take heart though; it’s easy once you know the trick.

The term for linking people in Family Tree Maker is attach. Without knowing that it can be difficult to find the topic in the built-in help index. Looking in the table of contents for “add spouse” will yield instructions for adding a new spouse, but not attaching one. You won’t need the built-in help though because I made a video to show you how it’s done.
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How to Chart a Direct Line of Descent in Family Tree Maker 2012

17 Sep 2011 by 1 Comment

It’s sometimes helpful to have a chart showing an ancestor and only those descendants in a direct line of descent to another person. There is a descendant chart in genealogy software Family Tree Maker, but before FTM 2012 it included all of the descendants of the selected ancestor.

Family Tree Maker 2012 introduced an option on the descendant chart that enables you to focus the list of included descendants on just those in one line of descent.
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Family Tree Maker 2012 Blended Family View

15 Sep 2011 by 9 Comments

One of the new features in Family Tree Maker 2012 will help you see the relationship of children to parents at a glance. It’s called blended family view.

Blended family view is activated by clickinh a new button above the children list on the person view in FTM 2012. When on, the list of children includes all the children of the selected person, even those born of another partner. Watch this video to see Blended family view in two different scenarios.
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Preserving Muster Events in Reunion for Mac

29 May 2011 by 1 Comment

Just in time for memorial day, Ancestry.com has made available new military records. The two new databases, “U.S. World War II Navy Muster Rolls, 1938-1949″ and “U.S. Navy Cruise Books Index, 1918-2009″ offer a glimpse into the lives of our military ancestors. If you have ancestors in these online genealogy databases you will want to enter the records in your genealogy software. If you use Reunion for Mac, I’ll show you how its done in the accompanying video.

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Creating a Database Online Source Type in Reunion for Mac

29 May 2011 by 6 Comments

The amount of genealogy information available online is increasing. So is the importance of a good, basic citation format for online genealogy databases. As usual, I’ve been implementing GEDCOM safe versions of the citation formats genealogy expert Elizabeth Shown Mills recommends. The source type for databases online is based on one of her basic formats. Following the suggested full reference format for online databases, helps you and other genealogists find the cited database in the future, indicates the quality of your work, and can be used as a basis for more specific source types.
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Making Your Reunion for Mac Census Image Source Type GEDCOM Safe

14 May 2011 by 9 Comments

The census image online source type we created previously for genealogy software Reunion for Mac closely follows the recommendations of genealogy expert Elizabeth Shown Mills from her book, “Evidence Explained:Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace 2nd Edition” and her very handy, laminated Quicksheet for Citing Online Historical Resources Unfortunately many of the fields won’t be transferred should you share your database as a GEDCOM or move to different genealogy software.

This is because the GEDCOM (Genealogical Data Communications) standard doesn’t have fields for schedule, ward, enumeration district, dwelling, family, and person of interest.

I’m more interested in my research being preserved than following ESM to the letter. I invested at least eight hours figuring out the simplest way to show you how to make your census image online source type and citations GEDCOM safe. I recommend you move your source citations into this source type too.
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Safely Move from Free-form Citations to Source Fields in Reunion

16 Apr 2011 by 6 Comments

As you saw in a previous video about the dangers of free-form citations, genealogy software Reunion for Mac allows you to create source citations by entering source information into a free-form text field, but there are pitfalls to entering citations this way.

The free-form citation field in Reunion for Mac is exported with a GEDCOM tag that may not import as desired. Most of the source fields on the other hand, will export with well supported tags. Moving your free-form citations into source fields will help you preserve the effort you’ve put into your genealogy research.

In this video I show you a process I developed for safely moving free-form citations to source fields. It even works when the source is used for multiple people and events.
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The Dangers of Reunion Free-form Citations

10 Apr 2011 by 17 Comments

Reunion for Mac allows you to create source citations by either entering discrete source information into structured fields, entering all of it in a free-form text field, or a combination of both. Entering a citation in just the format you want using the freeform edit box can be an appealing idea; however, you ought to be aware of dangers of entering citations this way.

In this video I show you examples of what can go wrong down the road if you use free-form citations in Reunion for Mac.
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