Reviewed by WGS Pres. Paul W. Hutchins
Family Tree Legends version 4.0 is a powerful and sophisticated genealogy program designed to make it easy for you to collect, display, and organize information about your family history.
Whether it’s notes, medical facts, pictures, or multimedia files, this $29 program provides you with a single tool to capture every bit of information about the history of your family.
Here’s what Family Tree Magazine had to say when they gave the program a 5-Star Rating:
“A relative newcomer to the genealogy software arena, Pearl Street Software’s Family Tree Legends rivals the best programs in ease of use and charting. And as you’d expect from the creator of the popular GenForum, the Internet’s most popular genealogy message board system, Cliff Shaw.”
[As a side note, in just under a year, GenForum grew from nothing to a site that attracted tens of millions of page views per month. Today, GenForum has over 10 million messages posted on it and is the largest genealogy community on the Internet..]
Shaw felt GenForum no longer needed him and sold the company and concentrated his time onto developing his desire to integrate the computer with a genealogy program.
FTL and GenCirlces are the products of Shaw’s new company, Pearl Street Software.
You can download a trial version of the program from their website:
www.familytreelegends.com
Apart from some features built into the program that others don’t come close to matching, is the option to ‘upload’ your genealogy file to the GenCircles website or just store your genealogy database as a ‘safe keeping’ of your data file, updating whenever you want, and only sharing it if you choose to do so. This is a service that has the biggest advantage as a system backup that will never be lost if your computer crashes.
Also, if you work from several computers, you can keep them all updated by downloading it instead of having to copy it to disks and carry them back and forth between computers.
‘SmartMatches’ will match the names in your file, that you make public, with names submitted others, with the promise to never sell the information and always make it available for free.