What our customer's say!

"Good Starter", I've found this program to be great for organizing family information. The CD's were very helpful for me and I would probably buy a newer version. If you want to use this program to chart your roots all the way back the CD's might help. The layout definitely makes this software great for people to use. This is definitely the right software for people that just want to make charts and gather information on immediate family.

"Useless extra CDs and constant ads to buy additional items", Family Tree Maker Deluxe has some nice features. An instruction manual is included, but you'll hardly need to use it, as the basic genealogy program is simple to use and offers several options for viewing and printing your family trees. For this reason, I'm giving it two stars instead of one.

The problem with Family Tree Maker Deluxe is the extra CDs which are included with the basic program. I found the extra CDs to be absolutely worthless. There is nothing on the box outlining in detail what you'll find on the CDs, so let me give you an idea.

4 of the CDs are a "Family Finder Index" which include millions of names, some of which are sketchy at best and include a lot of ??? instead of full names and dates. You may find the names of many of your ancestors here, but if you click on the name to see what additional information is available and if this is really your ancestor, you aren't given any information about the person. You are instead given an advertisement to purchase yet more CDs or an online subscription. This seems to be the typical response for most of the "research" associated with this software.

2 of the CDs contain the Social Security Death Index from 1937-1999, all of which can be looked up online for no cost.

1 CD is "Family History: Mid-Atlantic Genealogies" and contains information on the following families: Condit, Dill, Dodge, Douglas, Dutton, Emerick, Emmons, Mott, and Schell.

1 CD is "Local and Family Histories: New England" and contains the following information: Descendents of Thomas Dickinson; History of the Dudley Family; The Eaton Family of Nova Scotia; and the History of the town of Bristol, New Hampshire.

1 CD contains Military Records of US Soldiers from 1784-1811.

You are also given one-month access to Genealogy.com's World Family Tree collection, which lets you view the family trees of other people who have purchased the software and posted their family trees, unless they have marked the information "private." I found this feature to be practically worthless, as the format for viewing the online trees was confusing and difficult to navigate.

You are also given access to Genalogy.com's search engine, but again, if you run across any matches for the names you're researching, you're told to purchase more CDs or an online subscription, many of which were quite costly. Genealogy.com does have many census records available, but each decade is a separate CD, and buying all of them would be a ridiculous expense.

I'd suggest skipping this particular version of Family Tree Maker altogether and either purchasing the basic no-extra CDs version of Family Tree Maker or using another genealogy program entirely.

"Fantastic product!", This helped me re-create most of 20-years of research that was lost in a fire. All in all, I was also able to find new information, in less than 40 hours.