Customer Reviews

Family Tree SuperTools

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Wholly Genes has given up a glimpse of what's to come in the next version of The Master Genealogist v. 5.0! Family Tree SuperTools lives up to its name as the premier utility for genealogical data exchange. Want to share your genealogy database with a cousin? You use different software? Then buy SuperTools. It imports data from most genealogy software into projects where you can compare the data and print beautiful charts.
Import as little as 1 database or as many as you like (limited only by your disk space!). The charts include fan, descendants, pedigree, and hourglass charts. The chart-printing program allows you to tweak the output to fit onto pages and add photographs or other graphics. These are great for family reunions.

If you own The Master Genealogist you have the best tool to set up data to be used by SuperTools, but it handles GEDCOM as well as native formats of so many different genealogy programs! The screens are highly customizable and then you can save the layouts. This saves time when you want to see different windows with different types of projects. Other tools include a master place list, relationship calculator, and date calculator. The master place list alone has greatly assisted me in cleaning up the place names in my database! You still have trouble remembering what 6th cousin 2 times removed means? Then use the relationship calculator on any two people in the database and let it do the tree climbing. The date calculator is always handy to figure out the birth date from the tombstone or obituary that says age: 21 years 6 months and 2 days.

If the above wasn't enough to entice you into buying SuperTools, then add in a handy way to search 5 websites for a group of names. Build a focus group and then click on the menu entry `Web', you will pop-up a window per site per name. The sites searched are FamilySearch.org, Ancesty.com, Gendex.com, Rootsweb.com and genealogyportal.com. The only negative about these searches is that it's easy to get carried away with the list of names and before you know it, you have a screen full of windows to examine. In such a short time, you can generate so much to look at that you will be busy for a long while.

Family Tree SuperTools is a tremendous value from the genealogy software company that is the benchmark of the industry!

Jeri Steele

This program is great. Unlike many other genealogy programs, it can do many things that others can'tFor starters, it can read (directly) data from a number of other programs (TMG, FTM & PAF among others) without having to be re-entered or without using an intermediate file (GEDCOM). It can create slide shows of the entire family to display during family reunions from its own files and/or from other files on the computer. The charts that can be created are excellent and can even be modified as desired by moving, adding, or deleting information on the chart after it is generated and before it is printed. The chart program used to produce the charts is an included free standalone program that is one of the better graphics programs available and by itself is worth the price of Family Tree SuperTools.

My main use of this program is as a gift to some of my relatives and friends who don't use The Master Genealogist (TMG). This way they can read my data from TMG and compare it with their data from another program. A number of them have switched permanently to TMG which has even more capability than Family Tree SuperTools. But all have said they like this program.

As for Customer SERVICE, I got it when I called the vendor for help. One relative happend to ask a question on the RootsWeb mailing list for Family Tree SuperTools and they received a phone call within an hour. Of course, not everyone will get service like that, but it impressed me.

This two-in-one tool provides both analysis and display of your family history data. It lets you import your data directly from many popular programs - there's no loss of data from GEDCOM transfers. You can import several different databases - yours, those received from cousins, and those downloaded from the Internet - and keep them separate so you can examine and compare them.

Analysis tools include side-by-side display, filters, color coding using a variety of user-defined criteria, and Internet searches. You can compare names, dates, facts, and sources from different databases. Or you can search your own data for people in specific places or times to look for connections. Just being able to color-code people who are ancestors of a given person, lived in a given town or state, or the like, turns the display itself into an analysis tool.

As for output, my favorite is the variety of highly customizable "box charts" - Ancestor charts, Descendant charts, Fan charts, and more, each with seemingly endless numbers of options. And once the chart is generated, you can edit it further, moving, adding, or deleting elements, to get just what you want. You can print them on your own printer, or send them to the Company's printing service for beautiful wall-size charts at reasonable cost. I've had some done for my own walls, and given them as gifts to family members. They loved them!

Multi-media isn't my thing, but if it's yours, you can create "slideshows" with photos, sounds, and other media which you can display or send to others. The media files can be either in your genealogy data or elsewhere on your computer.

All in all, a very useful tool at a reasonable price.

I've used Family tree supertools since shortly after it came out. It is a utility that any user can add to their bag of tools whether to get a different set of reports or to review their family history data in a different light. It is a sensational add-on to almost all programs.

Wholly Genes works hard to please their customers and this program, like their others, is a worthwile addition to your ancestor research tools.

I bought this product to create wall sized descendant charts. Wholly Genes also has a printing service and, of course, they recommend this product to design your chart. It may have been competitive years ago, but today it isn't.

I created a four generation descendant chart with about 100 names. FTST gives you a choice of "vertical" or "horizontal." No in between. Both charts ended up about 1 foot by 10 feet. And it took a full two minutes to create each one. Family Tree Maker created a better chart in about two seconds and allowed combining vertical and horizontal for a more compact chart that will also fit on a wall or desk. Both allow you to manually move the boxes. And there are online printing services who will print a large chart from your FTM data in three days. FTST's service wants three weeks.

Before uninstalling it I tried the "Web Search" feature. You point to a name in your database and FTST will submit that name to five online databases for you. It did that. (Four actually; one site was apparantly obsolete.) But that's all it does--submits the names. It does not submit any additional information at hand, like date or place of birth, so you end up with a huge, undifferentiated pile of results.

You can do lots better than Family Tree Super Tools.

While this software is a little helpful I'm not sure it's helpful enough, for $$. I was looking for a way to create a slideshow of my family tree for an upcoming family reunion. Since this product makes this claim "even create slide shows to celebrate your heritage" I thought that this must be the product for me. Well I was wrong.
Family Tree SuperTools is no different than any other family tree software, it only let's you create a slideshow for one indiviual and only with those items that are in the scrapbook for that person. So no actual family tree info ends up in the slideshow. If your CD burner has it's own slideshow software then you'v already got better software than this package will supply you.
The search tools that this software have are ok but basically this software is just like any other family tree software I have tried, there really isn't much of anything new here.
I contacted Wholly Genes to try to get some information and they have never replied. Strike two in my opinion.
All in all a very disappointing piece of software.