Family Tree Builder 6.0.0.5634

Family history’s big business as far as the internet’s concerned: just imagine, details of your ancestors’ lives (as well as some of your own records) are all publicly available online – for a price, of course. The big websites like Ancestry have wrapped up the market in online record archives, but the internet offers more than just a digital database, with family history themed social networks making it possible to get in touch with far-flung relatives and distant cousins.

MyHeritage.com is one such website, and one of its key selling points is that it provides this – Family Tree Builder – for no cost. The catch is that you’ll need a MyHeritage.com account to use it, but as this needn’t cost you a cent, it’s no major drawback, and you’ll be able to use the program to track down possible matches with other MyHeritage.com members quickly and easily, even if it costs a pretty penny in terms of upgrading to a Premium subscription in order to actually contact them.

Don’t let this tie-in distract you, though: Family Tree Builder is actually a superb program for recording and organising your family history, along with any associated documents and media files. It has everything you’d expect of a genealogy program, plus some features that put it on a par with paid-for titles. Most impressive of all is the image-handling tools, which feature facial detection allowing you to quickly and easily tag photos of various family members. There’s also all the options you need for recording details about your ancestors, plus additional tools like charting and report publishing, mapping and so on.

Some features are limited for free account holders – you can only upload the first 250 individuals in your tree to the MyHeritage.com website for example, but these limitations largely apply to online features like smart searching. Even without these extras, Family Tree Builder has all the tools a budding genealogist needs.

Version 6 adds a number of features that are linked into your MyHeritage.com account, plus makes it possible to search the World Vital Records databases for information about your ancestors from within the program itself. You then sign up for an account to access the records, which can then be merged into your research file with just a few clicks. Rather annoyingly, the cost of a World Vital Records subscription is in addition to that of a Premium MyHeritage.com subscription, but thankfully you're not obliged to pay anything.

An unfairly overlooked gem when it comes to family history software, Family Tree Builder is both powerful and easy to use, packed with useful features for any budding genealogist.