Ancestry.com: Family Tree Maker 2011 launched

Ancestry.com today announced the release of Family Tree Maker 2011, an improved version of the popular family history software.

Tracing the Tribe first began recording our family history on a very early DOS version of FTM. Readers of a certain age will remember the amber-on-black interface. Wow - that was a long time ago! FTM is some 20 years old and has gone through numerous updates.

Over the years, Some new releases were good, some not so. This new release claims more than 100 improvements, but I'll leave it to our geneablogger techies - such as Dick Eastman and Randy Seaver - to analyze the new version.

From the press release of today, it appears that changes were recommended by a "diverse base of novice and experienced family researchers."

The release spotlighted these:

-- Search Ancestry.com without leaving FTM, and incorporate matching results into a tree.

-- When connected to the internet, FTM 2011 automatically searches Ancestry.com for historical documents

-- The SmartStory editor allows researchers to drag-and-drop text and photos from a tree into story pages that will update automaticallly when a change is made to that tree.

-- More complete timelines means researchers can find and add more events to ancestors' lives; add, edit and delete individual historical events and apply historical events by time and geography.

--Charts: new fan chart styles; enhance charts with backgrounds, borders and embellishments; use fonts based on fact type

-- Improved integration: A researcher can find - from among Ancestry's millions of members - those searching for the same ancestors via Member Connect activity on a home page, links to related message boards and new messages; faster uploading/downloading of a tree.

-- Media management tools to drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste, categorize multiple items at the same time; and a new tool to locate missing media files.

-- Enhanced ancestor and descendant reports, an added surname report, sort custom reports, save and reuse report settings

Click here for more information. The software starts at $39.95.