Day: December 9, 2015

Ancestry.com announced today that they are going to discontinue their stand-alone genealogy program, Family Tree Maker. Their theory is that most people want to use the web-only version. Well I don’t. I hate the web version with the heat of a thousand suns. Plus, I’ve put a huge amount of time and energy into researching this stuff. I want my research to be in my hands and under my control, not floating around up in the cloud.

So, I’ve been playing around with Legacy Family Tree. It’s not the answer to all my prayers. Not even close.

1. It stripped out the individual URLs from all of my source citations. Not cool!

2. It can’t seem to display ID numbers on the individual screen. You can see them on the family group screen, which is okay, but it’s not ideal. (It may actually have this capability, and I’m just not able to find it. It also may have that capability in the pay version. I don’t know if I want to take that chance, though, considering that I’m not in love with the program.)

3. The scroll wheel does not seem to work on the individual page. If you want to look at hidden items in a long list of events, you have to click on the slider bar. Clunky!

4. I can’t find an option to set a home person (usually yourself). I don’t mind if the program opens to the last person viewed, but I’d like a shortcut key to quickly navigate to my chosen home person. (Oh! Wait! It looks like there is an option to set a “startup family.” That might work.)

None of these are deal breakers. I just to find some time to sit down and really explore the program before I decide whether or not it will work for me. You’d think, with all the time off work I’ve taken to sit and stare at the damn dog, I could have been at least a little bit productive, but YOU WOULD BE WRONG. Staring at the dog is hard work, yo’.