Wednesday 6 May 2009

Family Historian 4 - First thoughts

As I've blogged previously I use Family Historian software for my genealogy work. A couple of weeks ago a new version was published and I downloaded it.

I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting but I was slightly underwhelmed at first.

The first most obvious change is the use of Projects. As an upgrading user I'm not sure that projects are of use to me. They are a way of organising your data, source, multimedia etc so that you keep everything together. I have my media organised already and don't want a duplicate copy of everything so I think for now I won't be using the Project feature. However, if I was just starting out then I think the Project feature would be invaluable as everything would be properly organised from the beginning.

The next obvious change is the Focus window. I like this new feature as it makes it easy to see information about a particular person and their family.

You can also see the properties of the person you are "focused" on. The properties can also be customised. As well as having the usual tabs of information you can add your own.


I've added a tab to show what flags are associated with each person and I'm in the process of creating one to show all census events. This allows me to see the information very quickly and change it where necessary.


I'll leave it there for now while I carry on playing with FH4 but will review the updated multimedia functionality soon.

1 comment:

  1. I have never been comfortable using the properties window, instead I usually edit directly in the records window, but I might just give it another try now it can be customised and resized. I especially like your idea with the flags tab.

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