All features

FamilyTree is one window: a list of people on the left, nine tabs on the right. The interface is in English and Dutch; switch at the top right, and FamilyTree remembers your choice.

People list and toolbar

Every person in the file, searchable by name, nickname, birth year and birthplace. The list stays fast with thousands of people. Above it: new, open, save, save as, backup, undo and redo (thirty steps deep) and add person.

Every save first copies the previous version to a .bak file, and the new file is written through a temporary file, so a crash halfway through can never leave half a file behind. Backup writes one ZIP next to your file, named with today's date, holding the file and every photograph it refers to. Closing the window with unsaved changes asks whether to save them first.

Person

Everything about one person on one screen: name, nickname and sex; birth, baptism, death and burial with date and place; parents and siblings; spouses and children per family, with marriage and divorce dates; residences per life phase; the photo gallery; the group photographs they appear in; notes; and, if you want it, the raw GEDCOM record.

Dates all go through the same control: a qualifier (exact, about, before, after, estimated, calculated) plus day, month and year. You can also simply type 31/12/1946. Anything that does not fit, such as between 1899 and 1901, goes in a free-text field.

Notes take as much free text as you like: a source, a question still open, what an old letter said. Every note travels in the GEDCOM file as a NOTE, so it reaches other programs too.

+ Historical document attaches a deed, a letter, a newspaper clipping or a scanned PDF to a person. The file is copied into images/ just like a photograph, with _HD and a sequence number in its name, so you can see at a glance who it belongs to. When it is not an image, the screen shows its extension with an Open button that hands it to your own program.

Editing a photo

Click a photo to open it large, with the tools on the right. Rotate, mirror and straighten a photo that was scanned at an angle, without empty corners. Crop a part by dragging across the photo. Remove the background, quickly, or thoroughly with a larger model that also works on old black-and-white and sepia photos (with a bar showing how far it is). Use the eyedropper to click a colour that should go too, such as the card around an old portrait. Correct the tone with Auto tone B/W for black-and-white and yellowed photos or Auto tone colour for colour photos, and brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth, sharpness, noise and black-and-white by hand.

The result appears next to the original and is saved as a new photo of the same person, with the same kind and life stage. The file you edited always stays as it was.

Dragging photos from a folder

On the right of the window the Files panel slides open: the photos of one folder with a large preview, the subfolders above them and the parent folders as buttons. Drag a photo onto a person in the list or onto the Person tab, and it opens in Photos for that person, ready to be saved. Dragging it onto the Photos tab opens it there to mark the people on it; dragging a document onto a person links it straight away. On a wide screen the photos go into two columns.

Tree

An hourglass around the selected person: ancestors above with their Kekulé numbers, descendants below with their partners. Zoom, show more or fewer generations, click to recentre, double-click to open someone. Save as PDF fits the whole tree on one A4 in landscape.

How are two people related?

Relationship with… asks for a second person and redraws the tree around what connects them: their nearest common ancestor at the top — with that ancestor's partner when both descend from the couple — and below it the two lines of descent side by side, one to each person. Above the tree the relationship is spelled out, such as second cousins or first cousins once removed, with the degree of kinship. When the same couple turns up more than once in someone's ancestry (pedigree collapse), FamilyTree says how many other common ancestors are just as close.

With Also by marriage (on by default), when the two are not blood relatives FamilyTree also searches through a partner: of one, of the other or of both, and also when the marriage is further up the tree, such as a grandmother who remarried. It then says plainly By marriage – not blood relatives, with a name such as brother- or sister-in-law or stepbrother or stepsister, and through whom it runs.

Photographs

• Save portrait crops one person out. A checkbox (off by default) removes the background so the portrait stands free in the tree and in the PDFs. The untouched original is always kept.
• Save the whole photo: when the photo already is a portrait, memorial card, gravestone or historical document of one person, save it without a rectangle, with its kind and life stage.
• Edit… opens photo editing (see above) for the person of the chosen rectangle, with that rectangle as the crop.
• Save family photo keeps the photograph as a whole and remembers where each tagged person is in it.
• Find faces detects the faces itself and proposes names based on the portraits already in the file. Above 45 per cent similarity a proposal counts as certain, between 30 and 45 per cent as likely. You confirm with Enter and move on to the next face. Nothing is ever linked without you.
• Possibly also in the photo suggests relatives of the people you have already confirmed, filtered to those alive on the date of the photo.
• The overview lists every family photograph with warnings about sharpness, resolution, exposure, and dates that cannot be right.

Tagging the people in a family photo

A family photograph — a wedding, a christening, everyone in front of the farm in 1912 — is kept as one photo, with a frame around each person in it. That is how you do it:

1. Drag the photo onto the Photos tab, or click Choose a photo….
2. Click Find faces. FamilyTree draws a frame around every face and compares each one with the portraits and family photos already in your tree. Every frame gets a suggestion with a percentage; Enter confirms it and moves on to the next face. Someone who is already in the photo is not suggested a second time.
3. A face nobody recognised? Pick the person yourself, or one of the relatives under Possibly also in the photo. Missed a face? Draw a frame around it.
4. Fill in the date if you know it. If not, FamilyTree works out the period from the people in it: after the youngest was born, before the first one died. A combination that cannot be right gets a warning — usually someone is linked to the wrong frame.
5. Save family photo. The photo is copied into your images folder and each person gets a link to it with the position of their frame. Tick one box and a portrait is cut out for every new person at the same time.

From then on the photo shows up on the Person tab of everyone in it. Edit reopens it with all the frames, to add, move or remove people later.

Family photos in your exports

• One family photo to PDF (at the bottom of the Export tab): one A4 landscape page with the photo, a numbered frame around each person and a legend with names and years. Print it to keep with the original, or give it to the family.
• In the PDF report, tick the family photos in which someone from the report appears. They come as extra pages at the end, with the same numbered frames.
• The HTML site shows the family photos on the page of each person in them, with numbered frames: click a face to go to that person.
• In GEDCOM the frames travel with the file: as _RECT in GEDCOM 5.5.1 and as the standard CROP in GEDCOM 7, so other programs that read GEDCOM 7 know where each person is in the photo.
• Exports can take only the family photos, without the portraits: choose Family photos only under the photographs.

Places

A table of every spelling in your file, how often it occurs, and what FamilyTree would make of it. The built-in gazetteer knows postcodes and municipalities for 122 countries — Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Luxembourg and Germany always, other countries as soon as they appear in your file — plus every place in the world with more than five hundred inhabitants. Historical spellings, Dutch exonyms for foreign cities and plain typing errors are all recognised.

Filter by unresolved, certain, choice or no proposal; accept all the certain ones in one click; then apply everything as a single step you can undo at once.

Towns that changed their name are recognised too: Batavia is today's Jakarta, Leopoldstad is Kinshasa, Elisabethstad is Lubumbashi. FamilyTree proposes the modern name — that is the one on the map — and offers to keep the name from the record as a note on everyone it concerns: originele plaatsnaam: Batavia. Nothing is lost.

Map

The places from your file on a world map, coloured per life phase: birth, youth, adulthood, later life and death, with the life path drawn between them. Choose whose places you see: this person, this family, the ancestors, the descendants or everyone. Places without coordinates are listed separately with a link to the Places tab.

The map works entirely offline — country and province borders ship with the program. If a place is not in the gazetteer, you point at it on the map yourself.

Export

Choose who goes in — everyone, one person, a family, the ancestors, the descendants or both, with or without spouses and siblings — and in which formats: PDF, GEDCOM 5.5.1, GEDCOM 7 and an HTML site that opens without internet. As separate files in a folder or together in one ZIP; GEDCOM 7 on its own becomes a GEDZIP. Living people can be shown, reduced to their name, or left out. Photographs can be switched on or off per kind, down to “family photographs only”.

The PDF is an ancestor chart, a descendant report or a register of names. Tick what goes in: a textual overview, a graphical tree on A4 landscape, portraits in that tree, a fan chart, a map of the places with a list per life phase, and the family photographs any of those people appear in — each with numbered frames and a legend (see family photos in your exports). A live preview sits beside the options.

Ask family

Often the answer is in someone else's photo album. Ask family helps you write to a relative in five plain steps: about whom, to whom, what you would like to know, how to send it, and a last look. FamilyTree lists what is still missing for that person — a photograph, a date of birth, the parents, where someone is buried — for one person or several at once, such as a couple with their children — and turns your choice into a friendly letter in your own name, informal or formal, in English, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali or Indonesian. When you and the recipient are both in the tree, it says how you are related: my grandparents were also your great-grandparents.

With it comes a one-page attachment: what you already know, a small diagram of how you are related, and your questions with room to write the answers. An e-mail opens as a draft in your own e-mail program, so it comes from your own address and you press Send yourself; a paper letter is a PDF to print; for WhatsApp the text is copied for you. FamilyTree never sends or reads mail. A tip at every step explains what gets answers: two or three concrete questions, no links, a personal sentence, a stamped envelope for older relatives.

Checks

A list of what is wrong or suspicious: a child born before its parents, a death before a birth, references that lead nowhere. Click a name to jump there. It re-runs itself after every change.

Merge

Place a second GEDCOM file beside yours. FamilyTree looks for each person in turn — first on the internal identifier most programs carry, then on name and birth date, and finally on similarity, where a matching father or spouse tips the balance. When it is not sure, it does not choose: it puts the options to you.

The result is a foldable list per person showing, field by field, what would change. Additions arrive ticked, contradictions do not: what you already have always wins unless you decide otherwise. Photographs from the other file are copied in and renamed by FamilyTree's own rules; photographs you already have are recognised even under a different name or at a different resolution. When the other file holds a clearly sharper copy, it is added as an extra photograph: what you had stays, and stays the main photo.

Dates and places are reconciled first, or every difference in spelling would show up as a contradiction. 1977-07-20 and 20 JUL 1977 are the same day, and the built-in place list knows that Duinkerke and Dunkerque, Nord, FRANCE are the same town, as are Kortrijk and 8500 Kortrijk, West-Vlaanderen, BELGIUM. Only a certain match counts: in doubt it stays a difference, because silently equating two places is worse than one report too many.

The same tab doubles as a way to check an older backup. At the top sits a summary: how many people are exactly the same, how many differ, and above all how many exist only in that other file. If that last number is zero, FamilyTree says so in as many words. One click writes the whole overview to a text file without changing anything at all.

Afterwards a report is written next to your file listing everything that was taken over and everything that was not, and why. The whole merge is a single undo step, and a timestamped copy is made before anything is touched.