Millions of people have used Family Tree Maker, the #1 selling genealogy software, to discover and share their family stories. Now, with an intuitive new interface and dozens of new features - making it easier than ever to explore your roots.

Family history is a fun, rewarding hobby that connects you with your past and brings you closer to your present family.  Just getting started?  Family Tree Maker 2008 Essentials will make it easy for you to explore and preserve your family heritage.  Already and expert?  You will appreciate the program‘s robust features, including flexible data-management options and wide variety of output choices.

Family Tree Maker 2008 Essentials lets you easily:

• Explore your heritage
• Preserve family stories, photos and more
• Create beautiful charts to display and share
• Essentials Edition total retail value: $140

Family Tree Maker integrates seamlessly with Ancestry.com, allowing you to easily access the world‘s largest online collection of family history records.  Ancestry.com is home to many different types of records, including census, military, immigration, land and probate records, just to name a few.  


Product Highlights

• Create a family tree starting with names, dates and events.
• Attach photos, documents and audio and video files.
• Find information on the Web and merge it into your family tree.
• Use dynamic maps to explore the places where your ancestors once lived.
• View timelines that show your ancestors‘ lives in historical context.
• Design and print charts to display at home and share with family.

Includes

The Essentials Edition total retail value is $140!

• Training Video (DVD)
  Watch as family history expert Megan Smolenyak presents tips and guidelines for building your family tree.
  
• Getting Started Guide
  Follow the directions in the handy guide to begin your first Family Tree Maker project and master the program’s basic features.
  
• Our History in Images (2 DVDs)
  Add visual excitement and historical context to your family tree with this collection of  historical maps, war and conflict photos and vintage postcards from all 50 states.
  • Historical Maps - Explore period maps of the areas where your ancestors lived.  This collection includes more than 1,500 maps, charts and diagrams.
  • War and Conflict -  Browse images of the conflicts that shaped U.S. history.  This volume includes more than 1,500 photos, drawings and paintings.
  • U.S. Postcards: Add visual excitement and historical context to your family tree with more than 30,000 vintage postcards from all 50 states.
    
• Ancestry.com
  1-month U.S. Deluxe subscription to the Web‘s largest collection of family history records. (Subscription term begins upon installation of your Family Tree Maker software)
  

 New Features

This completely redesigned program has dozens of new features, including:

• A new interface that combines elements of a pedigree chart and a family group sheet, making it much easier to enter, view and edit your data
• Vastly improved integration with Ancestry.com
• A web clipper that lets you merge data from anywhere on the web into your tree
• Standardized criteria for rating your sources
• Features that make it easy to manage photos and other media files and incorporate them into charts and reports
• A place authority with more than 3 million place names that helps you correctly enter locations
• Dynamic lists that show you all the people and events associated with a particular place
• Timelines that highlight personal, family and world events that occurred during your ancestors’ lives
• A robust tool for sorting and managing your to-do list
• The ability to import data from other genealogy programs, including Personal Ancestral File, The Master Genealogist and Legacy Family Tree

• Windows XP SP2, Vista
• 500 MHz Intel Pentium II (or equivalent) processor
• 460 MB for installation / 256 MB of RAM
• 2X CD-ROM Drive (required for installation)
• 800 x 600 resolution monitor
• All online features require Internet access
• Some supplemental products require a DVD-ROM Drive