Why I buy this one ?
- The best-selling genealogy program for 15 straight years, Family Tree Maker lets you access the U.S. Records Collection, Naturalization Records, Immigration Records and more
- Create a family tree in four easy steps; streamlined data entry and useful research tips make tree creation a breeze
- Includes pre-designed templates so you can share your family tree with friends and relatives
- Allows for online collaboration, so you can work with other family members to complete your tree
- Includes over $350 of bonus material, including one-year subscription to Ancestry.com, Deluxe Ancestry Reference Library Software, and more

What our customer's say!

"Love/ Hate Relationship", I do love the fact that I can properly create a family tree. Anyone who has done a family tree knows how annoying it is to try to keep track of relatives in an orderly fashion. I have used another program and found it to be restraining. So, as far as organization this is a great program and I recommend it. However, there is a dark side. My family tree is considered a large file and this program has a little trouble uploading it to [...]. Could be that the website won't accept my large file and therefore this isn't a software issue. I also cannot seem to print everyone in the tree, which includes extended families (aka cousins). I would be thrilled to be able to print all 20, 000 names I have in my tree. Depending on the size of your tree, you will either love this product or hate it. And, then there's this thing about dates. It seems the program can't recognize a BC date. I ended up entering the date in the location tab. The bundle included with the package seemed to be a waste of time for me. Anything I needed for research was found on the web. A little thought into research and you will figure it out on your own. The [...] subscription is well worth it though. I got a full year of US research, which is great if all your relatives lived in the US. I had to pay extra for the World Wide Deluxe (since 99% of my ancestors came from Europe) but it came out cheaper in the end. Worth it, worth it, worth it! The big plus is the ability to instantly research an ancestor with the press of a button. From there you can simply add the information into your program without having to type all the facts. You can perform a cut and paste operation if using another site. The printed reports look very professional. Overall, I think this program makes genealogy that much easier. Could it be better? Yes.

"Love it!!", I have been using this for a couple of weeks and love it!! It is great that everything is in one file--I do not have to constantly switch between discs in order to find out everything about my ancestors! My only problem is that it is tough to look through all names. I'll type in one name (i.e., John Doe), with a specific birth date (even just a year--1929), and I get EVERY John Doe that existed, but does not match the date (I get dates before the John Doe I want even existed, like 1837!) or get people that have the same first name, but not last name or birth date. I'll get people with the same last name, but not first name or birth date! It's a little frustrating to have to weed through over 1 million or more nonmatching people on there! Or, if I just want a marriage date, I have to sift through birth dates and/or death dates as well (they are combined in the same section). Plus, I noticed that the Social Security Death Index is not exactly accurate. My grandfather's date of death, along with my mother-in-law's, are off; in my gf's case, by as much as a week, whole my MIL is off by several days.

Otherwise, this is a great tool to help find information on relatives. And it does help to have the free one-year membership to Ancestry.com (mark your calendar to contact and cancel otherwise you will be charged the full one-year fee to your credit card). Unfortunately, there are some things you cannot access and will have to pay a fee for (like my father-in-law's immigration data--I will have to pay about $25 for a one-month access to this; hope it will be worth it).

This is a good addition to the Family Tree Maker group.

"WARNING: Huge Hidden Charges!", Family Tree Maker comes with a 'free' trial membership to Ancestry.com. The software is linked in numerous ways to this site, so it is very tempting to activate the free 3,6,9, or 1 year membership (depending on which version you buy). The 'free' membership is actually an annually recurring membership that will automatically charge your credit card for a whopping $155.40 after your 'free' membership expires. The company will not issue a refund if you dispute the charge and they will file rebuttal letters with your bank if you try to charge-back their charge to your credit card (a credit card is required to use Ancestry.com). None of this information is included in the printed material that comes in the box, on the box, or in the 88 page users guide that comes with the software. The software has no information on the recurring annual subscription policy either. You can cancel the subscription if you notify them in advance of being billed, but in my case, I had no idea that I had signed up for a recurring service so I had no reason to notify them that I wanted to cancel a subscription that I had finished using 6 months prior to being billed. In the end, I wound up paying about $250.00 for this software. Buyer beware.

"Pay Very Close Attention to the Platform Software", I debated strongly whether to give this product 2 stars, which is what I would give it if I were rating my own experience. I erased this software from my computer last week and purchased a different package from another provider which is working quite well.

The platform indicated for this software is Windows XP. In order to be fair, I've given the extra star because I believe had I not attempted to use this product with an operating platform of Window's Vista my experience would have been better. There is a Vista patch on the products website so it is fair to make this observation. The interminable cycle of attempting to load, erase and reload this program in otder to get the program to work correctly reached a point for me where I was spending more time and effort attempting to use the program than I was doing Family Research.

The benefit of this program and what attracted me initially was that I have a membership at a well known genealogy web-site and this is designed to integrate there to allow strong internet research. The few time's it ran smoothly, I found it to work well.

If you have Vista or any desire to upgrade to Vista I stongly recommend looking to Family Tree Maker 2008 instead of this software. I suspect it works better on the Vista Platform. I just cannot recommend this particular version at all. It was a waste of time and money for me.

"family tree maker 16", great product but would have preferred a few more templates to use when making a tree to print

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Family Tree Maker version 16 Collectors Edition", I was familiar with the way that the Family Tree Maker works because I have owned several older versions with version 10 being the most current. I was satisfied with the actual charts, but the writing in the books is so small that I needed a magnifier to read much of it and the illustrations were completely useless because they were illegible.

"Great place to start your research !", I found this software easy to use & was pleased with the results. My only disappointment was not being able to access records from outside the US.

"Family Tree needs to suply magnifying glass", The manual provided is a full print version which is commendable in todays software climate where nothing can normaly seen in print without a screen. However the Type chosen is so small that anyome with normal vision cannot possibly folow the text without a magniying glass. Definitely tis version of a great softeare is not designed for mere mortals especially if they are ageing

"Wonderfully easy to use!", I bought this edition because the version I had was too old to update. This was a real cost bargain, because the Collectors Edition was less money than the Deluxe Edition (at least on Amazon!), and is a better Edition. With more perks and features in the Collectors Edition, it is all I wanted in genealogy software. The free year with Ancestory.com that comes with the purchase of the Collectors Edition is the most useful bonus I can imagine. The new version merged perfectly with my previous version (I had version 6 and this new one is version 16!) and all my information was brought into this Edition without a hitch. The instructions are clear and easy to follow. I would definitely recommend this software to anyone looking for an easy to use, comprehesive yet simple, genealogy program.

"Familty Tree Maker software ", This software has a lot of features. It will be very helpful to get all of my family history organized.