Family Historian 4 genealogy software

Family Historian is unlike most other genealogy programs. Rather than coming from a large software company, it's designed and made by a small British firm, and it's the only program made by the company.

The program is designed with genealogists in mind, whether professional or amateur, something that shows through as soon as you fire it up.

Version 4 has been available since last year, but a new 4.1 update (available in 'beta' or testing mode at the time of writing, but available in full very soon) adds some clever new features, and is available to existing version 4 users as a free download from the Family Historian website.

The first thing to note is that Family Historian 4.1 doesn't look particularly great. Initially, in fact, it's a bit of a disappointment, being quite old-looking (in computing terms) compared with some of the glitzier family tree software.

But as is often the case with software, looks can be deceiving, and behind the unglamorous looks lie a powerful set of tools that is also quite easy to use. The makers emphasise that while screen looks are important, the program is designed to make your tree look good on paper, which it does. The basics are all there, such as the ability to add multiple spouses and families that contain half-siblings and step-children, and it will automatically complete some entries such as place names, based on things you've already typed.

The program is based around two parts of the main window. The Focus Window shows the relationships of the currently selected person (who's known as the 'focus') to others in the tree. The Property Box allows you to quickly see and edit that person's vital statistics, and add media such as pictures, video, audio and even music. This makes it much easier to edit a person's attributes than in many programs we've seen. Cleverly, pictures can be linked to people's faces, vital for picking people out of group shots.

The focus window is new in this version and the property box has been reworked, which may cause some confusion for upgrading users, but not for long. Multiple undo and redo levels have been added so it’s easy to backtrack if you make a mistake, and the ‘how related’ tool is now too: it can explain how two people are related in nine ways, even through third parties.