Family Historian

Over the years, the Calico Pie-developed application Family Historian received a lot of positive feedback from the media, and for good reason. This is a properly good genealogy software application that puts a lot of useful features at your disposal without sacrificing ease of use in the process. Over time, the software got better and better, improving its functionality and ease of use. The stable version at the time of writing this is Family Historian 4; version 5, which will be a major upgrade, is penciled in for a March 2012 release.

To get started with Family Historian you will first have to download a 20.4Mb executable, then run it and follow the instructions presented by the setup wizard. You can install Family Historian on any Windows edition, from Windows 98 up to Windows 7. During the installation process you will get to pick the installation directory and select if you want a desktop shortcut or not.

When you launch Family Historian, a prompt window shows up and asks which project you want to launch. You can choose to create a new project or, if you want to better understand what the application does, you can load the sample project that’s built into the application. You will then be presented with the main application window which is called the Focus Window and you will see Ian Munro’s spouse and children to the left and the docked property box to the side. There’s nothing too complicated about Family Historian’s interface – even a novice computer user will not have any problems with it and will be able to easily access the functionality Family Historian has to offer.

Speaking about functionality, with the help of Family Historian you can create Ancestor, Descendant, Hourglass, Everyone and All Relatives trees and you can come up with good looking family tree websites and family tree CDs. You can enter a lot of information on each person in a tree or diagram, including photos – and you can link the persons to their faces in each picture they’re in. You can enter that information manually, or you can look it up online; Family Historian comes with a handy internet search tool.

You have 30 days to test Family Historian and see if the functionality it has to offer meets your needs. To keep using the application once the evaluation period is over, you will have to get a license.

There’s no doubt about it, Family Historian is a properly good genealogy software application that just keeps on getting better.