After much debating, considering the fall out from the last release, and a coupon to order 2010 for just $19.95, I bit the bullet and ordered. It was a prerelease sale and I have been waiting anxiously for it to arrive. My ordered version was not the first to show up. Instead I received the sales version with a free 2 week trial arrived on the 24th. I sent off an email asking where my purchased version was. The returned response, 2 days later, was that I purchased a prerelease and that it had been mailed on the 24 of August. Strange that they could get me the sales copy first.
I went ahead and installed the sales copy, I will register my account when the purchased version finally shows up. The software installed fine but when I went to import my ftm file the first time it stalled. I cancelled out and tried again and it went smoothly to completion. My first surprise after upgrading from 2006 to 2010 was the look of the interface. There were bars and windows of all types with information and the navigation was a bit different too.
One of the interesting things I found was that in the family view, there is a bit more information concerning the individual to keep you from completely getting lost. It gives the family relation to your home person for the individual you are currently working on. For example, Peter Coble is the 2nd great grandfather of the brother-in-law of the mother-in-law of me. Ok, it is still a bit convoluted but at least I will know when I have completed fallen out of my own orchard.
I am beginning to like having the family tree view along with the family listing in the same location, one window under the other. The index on this view is open to the left and detail information on the person being researched to the right. Changes to detail information are very handy this way without having to snap open another box and click save.
FTM 2010 ties in with your online ancestry subscription and brings what would have been 2 windows for me neatly into one. Clicking on the green leaf “hints” pops opens the search view window. Merging information into your personal data base becomes relatively simple. You can search all of the same records available to you on the online site.
The next tab for more detail information on the person lays out all of the census and factual data that you have and allows edits. Sub tabs along the bottom allow you to view any media saved to that specific person.
There is a map feature that is new, once selecting a person you can view the migration of up to 4 generations of ancestors. I haven’t figured out where best to use this information by saving it. You have to hover over each unmarked location dot to determine what belongs to each person. Using it for one relative that moved a lot helps get the feel for that particular migration.
One of the things that kept me from purchasing the previous version was the inability to create books, the one feature I use constantly to transport a family line data easily. These are the books that were devoured at the family reunion. I guess it was included in later updates to the previous version, but for me, at the time, it was too little to late for me to invest.
Before purchasing I had searched the web for user reviews for this version and didn’t find any. A complete reversal of what had happened in the previous release. All in all, so far so good with this version as I am getting use to where they “moved my cheese” to.