Discounts on Family Historian Gifts for Christmas

Get 25% off each copy of Family Historian 6 (download version) if you buy three or more licences. Get 12% off each licence if you buy just two. Each licence can be given as a gift certificate that you print yourself. The certificates include full instructions for downloading and installing the software. See Gift Packs on the Family Historian Store page to learn more.

Boxed copies of Family Historian also make great gifts; and so does the much-praised book Getting the Most from Family Historian 6, which is available for purchase for £14.95 on Amazon.co.uk and for $23.95 on Amazon.com. For more purchase options, for both box and book, see the Family Historian Store page.

At time of writing, it is still possible to buy Family Historian 5, available for £21.99 in Amazon.co.uk and for £19.95 from MyHistory. However stocks are limited and may run out soon.

Ancestral Sources: A Great (and Free) Companion Product

One of the goals of this newsletter is to alert new users to features and resources that they may not already know about; and to make sure that the old hands haven't missed them too. It's unlikely that many old Family Historian hands haven't come across Ancestral Sources; but new users may not know what it is. Well if you don't, you should. It's a companion product for Family Historian, designed to make it as easy as possible to enter data from a number of key source documents, such as census, and baptism, marriage and death records.

To make best use of a source document, you may want to do some or all of the following within Family Historian:

Create a Source record and possibly attach an image of the source document to it, and/or a transcription of key parts of the document
Add any new relatives mentioned in the document
Record all mentioned or implied events and attributes
Create citations linking all of the above to the new Source record

That's quite a lot of work for each source document. And that's where Ancestral Sources comes in. Entering the details of each source document into Ancestral Sources is quick and easy. And once you've done it, Ancestral Sources will instantly do all the above-listed tasks within Family Historian for you.

To learn more and to download the software, see the Ancestral Sources page on the Family Historian User Group website. This page contains many links, including one to Getting Started with Ancestral Sources which gives a useful introduction.

The program is free, but the author does appreciate donations, and these can be made from within the application.

Findmypast Hinting News

A popular and useful feature of Family Historian 6 is that it displays hints, with links you can click on, if it finds matching records in MyHeritage and Findmypast. The Findmypast hint service stopped working briefly last week. The good news is that the problem has been fixed and the service is now up and running again. However, if you're still having problems, Findmypast tell us that "any customers who have already encountered the bug will need to clear their browser cookies for Findmypast in order for the fix to take place". Just to be clear: you don't need to clear cookies for all sites - just Findmypast.

Discover Family Historian Snapshots

Here's a feature we suspect even many old Family Historian hands don't know about: Automatic Snapshots. Since version 6.1, Family Historian now takes automatic periodic snapshots of your main data file. At most one snapshot is taken every day and only if you make changes to the project. By default, only a maximum of 8 automatic snapshots are kept at any one time, to ensure that the space taken up by snapshots never becomes excessive. But this is configurable in Preferences (click the Advanced button on the General tab).

You can use the Snapshot Manager to revert to a recent snapshot if you wish. When you revert to a snapshot, the current state of your data, prior to the reversion, is saved as another snapshot - and unlike ordinary 'automatic' snapshots, a 'pre-revert' snapshot is not deleted automatically.

Snapshots are not a substitute for backups. Backups are extremely important and you are strongly recommended to take them regularly, and store your backups on some other medium, such as a USB key drive, external hard drive, or a folder in the 'cloud'. Snapshots will not protect you against many of the problems that can arise - such as theft of your laptop or PC, or complete hard disk failure. Nevertheless, they are a useful tool in your toolbox, and worth knowing about.

To learn more about snapshots, open the Family Historian Help (click Family Historian Help on the Help menu), choose the 'Search' tab on the left-hand side, and search for 'Snapshot Manager'.

Upcoming Events in 2018

There are already a few events related to Family Historian scheduled for 2018 - see the Events page on the Family Historian website (the last item on the 'Community' menu). We will add more events to this page, as we learn about them. If you belong to a society, club or association, which is organising events that are related to Family Historian, please email info@family-historian.co.uk and let us know. We will be happy to add them to the Events page.