Family Tree Maker 11

by Riverdeep

Product Features

• Massive toolset for exploring family history
• Powerful database organization tools
• One-click searching to find leads on your ancestors
• Export family books to PDF and other formats
• Many easy-to-use tools to make genealogy simple and fun

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000A0PXY
• Item model number: 382650
• Date first available at Amazon.com: June 12, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,793 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #79 in Software > Home & Hobbies > Genealogy
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Family Tree Maker allows users to embrace their past and enrich their future through easy, rewarding family research. The data entry wizard makes it easy to get started, simply enter a few facts about family and within minutes users will be creating heirloom-quality trees, maps, timelines, and reports in dozens of exciting formats.

Personalize designs with vivid colors, expressive fonts, borders--even photographs. Share findings on paper, traditional printouts, online scrapbooks, slide shows, and more. Family Tree Maker features sophisticated research tools, easy-to-use home page wizards, and the largest Internet genealogy community. It sets the standard for quality, value, and ease of use.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

162 of 166 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Robust program that has a lot of spam, October 16, 2003

By 

J. Myrick "juliafair" (Pasadena, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Family Tree Maker 11 (CD-ROM)

I've used a lot of different programs. The best free program is "Brother's Keeper", but Family Tree Maker is light years ahead of that program. I've used Origins because of its macintosh compatiblity. But at the end of the day Family Tree Maker has the most features, makes entering information and sources a snap, and generally keeps things easy.

The two real contenders these days are genealogy.com (the makers of Family Tree Maker), and ancestry.com. By far, the better website is ancestry.com. You can download a FREE program from their site to input ancestor information in. However, this program is very clunky to enter descendants, to add source information, etc. But what it does do, which you won't find anywhere else, is give you FREE access to one of the largest databases of personal family trees. I highly recommend starting with ancestry.com, if you want to dive into the genealogy world. The program immediately connects to the internet and tells you what the closest matches are to your tree. You just point and click. (another note, I have dsl, so the tree may be slow for dial-up users. Only for the internet savvy!)

In the other corner is Family Tree Maker. The program is far more robust, allows you to enter images into scrapbooks easily, has tons of features, and seamlessly integrates with the massive family tree library. If you have the money, you can go really far with FTM. But you will have to pay for CDs or internet information. If your tree matches up with an online tree, you'll need to pay the monthly fee to look at it.

The site requires you give them your credit card information, and you have to CALL to tell them when you want to stop, as it auto-renews your subscriptions. No email to tell them to cancel you! A real hassle.

But at the end of the day, the program itself is solid, and the best to create a family tree in. But I agree with other reviewers in the respect that the online "features" of the program are expensive and annoyingly spammish.

To wrap up, I strongly recommend FTM, but don't spend money on "Collector's" and "Deluxe". Just buy the plain and straightforward one. Use the program to keep all of your info in. Then start your internet search at ancestry.com and the Mormon's site familysearch.org. Once you've built up an extensive tree, then consider spending money on FTM cd's and internet access, if you really need them.

63 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Extra CDs a useless marketing gimmick, March 13, 2004

By 

Wm J. Milosh (Oxford, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Family Tree Maker 11 (CD-ROM)

I used version 6 of Family Tree Maker that came with Family Tree Maker for Dummies. I liked it so much I bought version 11. It came with the program CD and 4 additional CDs marketed to help you expand your family tree. The 4 extra CDs aren't worth the cost of producing them. At least not to the consumer. All the CDs do is list names that have been extracted from other data bases that it then refers you to. In other words, if a name appears on the social security death index, the CD lists the name and then tells you to go there for the information. A useless waste of time, and money. Every step along the way, Broderund uses every opportunity to steer the unsuspecting consumer toward purchasing even more CDs. The program is very good. Buy it without the extra CDs, and then don't fall for the World Family Tree marketing lies. The program will prompt you to contribute to the World Family Tree, but then you have to "subscribe" to see what others have contributed, if anything. There are far too many free and legitimate sources of information to fall for the easy CD fix.

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Easy to use - creates great reports, December 24, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Family Tree Maker 11 (CD-ROM)

I am very confused by all negative reviews of this product. I think this product is wonderful! With the click of your mouse, you can create beautiful color reports & charts and store them in .pdf format. I emailed them out as Christmas gifts to my relatives and they were thrilled! I was amazed at how easy it was to create professional looking reports with FTM.
I should mention I originally purchased The Master Genealogist program because the customer reviews were better than Family Tree Maker - but found it to be very difficult to work with. After 3 months using TMG, I still couldn't figure out how to make a decent report. Within 1 day of using the FTM, I had created a beautiful family tree book.
I think the FTM is perfect for the amateur genealogist looking to quickly and easily create family charts, trees & reports.
Also, I found entering data to be so much easier in FTM than TMG. I have been just thrilled with the product.