Review: MyHeritage Family Tree Builder

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I have been hooked on genealogy since the fifth grade. I was away from my genealogy research for the past twelve years because I hadn’t figured out how to fit it in with working full-time again. As I test various programs to try to find the best fit for my current self, I will review them for you here. This time, I will be reviewing MyHeritage Family Tree Builder, but you probably got that from the title.

I took a class offered by a local library a few weeks ago and learned just how far online genealogy has come while I was away from my research. I need to replace my genealogy software because the program I used so long ago, Family Tree Maker 2006, is such an old version that only works on my old laptop that is running Windows Vista. Yikes! It boots and runs the software but doesn’t go online or play nice most of the time and thus I am shopping for current software and asking myself if I should look around before I just buy the latest version of what I have used for as long as I have had computers.

I looked for genealogy software that would work on multiple devices without having to buy more than one copy. I want to run it on my Windows 7 desktop, my Surface Pro 2 running Windows 10 and my Android smartphone. So far, I am testing out MyHeritage Family Tree Builder. I chose this one to start with because it is free for up to 250 people and would work on my various devices.

It took some trial and error, but I got the hang of entering info into it in the online version and then discovered it would easily sync to my devices, so that is definitely a plus in my book. The thing I don’t like about it is the user interface on the computer. It just isn’t intuitive to me. It looks very cluttered, but that might just be the small monitor I am using.

I also tried to print out the info I entered into it over the last two days so I could see where I was and what still needed to be done and there wasn’t an option that was home printer friendly. The option is there to print wonderful wall charts, but I just wanted to print out family group sheets and simple trees for reference. There doesn’t seem to be a way to compact the trees so there is less white space and more info on the pages.

I also tried the book printing option, and it does some pretty snazzy things but I was disappointed by how little info it put on some pages causing it to print either 23 or 28 pages for the 66 people I have in the file I created. I had copied and pasted some obituaries into the notes in the death section as a means of indicating where the info had come from and having it readily available at the same time. The first file I got when it created the book had all the obits showing but there was also a bunch of HTML tags included and I couldn’t find a setting that would let me take those out. The tags don’t show in the preview or in the window where I pasted the info so I was at a loss. I cut them and pasted them into notepad and tightened up the spacing some and then copied and pasted them back. They looked better but still had the occasional tag showing. I played with turning various options on and off and learned a lot about what was possible and was impressed with some options I never had in my old software. All this fiddling got the file down to 23 pages instead of 28 but the obituaries no longer printed and I cannot seem to find how they went away so no luck getting them back.

I have also noticed a trend lately where the programs have you start with yourself and go back from there. I didn’t want to do that, so when I was entering the test data, I started with the deceased patriarch of a family that shared the surname of one of my husband’s lines. Now, MyHeritage welcomes me with the name and face of this patriarch. I guess it never thinks anyone will be doing all this work for someone they are not descended from, so they try to make it idiot proof instead. What do professional genealogists use? Not, that I have any intention of going back to doing genealogy for hire as I did many years ago, but it would be nice not to be treated like an idiot by my family tree program.

So what do I think of this program? It will only be the “chosen one” if all the others are even less desirable than this. Now, that being said, I will likely still use it for some things, but it will not be my ONLY genealogy program.

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