Family Historian User Manual
Introduction
This document is the Family Historian User Manual. It can be
accessed either from within Family Historian itself, or on the Internet
using a web browser. Both options are available from the Help menu
within the program. When using the program, you can also jump
straight to pages that are relevant to the current context, by pressing
buttons wherever you see them, or by
pressing the F1 key on any workspace
window. The in-program version of the user manual has a
contents page, index and search capability. The Internet version
also has contents, index and search; but the search tool is more
powerful and comprehensive.
What is Family Historian?
Family Historian is a powerful genealogy program that lets you organise all your genealogy research in one or more projects (most people keep all their data in one project). Where does the data come from? You can enter it yourself. The data could be information you know yourself, information you acquire by interviewing your relatives, or information you acquire through other forms of research. You can also merge in data that you find on the Internet or acquire by other means from other genealogists. In this way you build up a collection of records for Individuals and Families, and store details of events and attributes relating to them. Importantly, Family Historian makes it easy for you to also record exactly where all the information came from (your sources). But you don't just store facts. Family Historian also lets you keep pictures of people and families (as well as pictures of other things such as places and events - not to mention scanned images of certificates and other sources) as well as video, sound recordings, and other media. Using the genealogy data you have entered or acquired (and associated pictures, etc) Family Historian will instantly create for you any of the following:
- charts and diagrams
- reports
- books or booklets
- queries - to analyse your data, or to extract portions of it for
use with other software tools
- maps - with markers, overlays and annotations
- websites
- family tree USB sticks, or CD/DVDs
- smart folders - for easy browsing and exploring
You can easily share all of these with family members, friends and other genealogists. If you wish, you can also share your family tree data files as well. This is because Family Historian uses GEDCOM as the format in which it stores its data. GEDCOM is the global standard format for shared genealogical data and all serious genealogy programs support it (although the extent to which they support it varies considerably). To learn more, see GEDCOM.
Where Do I Start?
For a quick overview see the Tour of Family Historian. You can access this tour at any time from the Help menu. See also Getting Started.
What's New in Version 8?
Family Historian is constantly being enhanced and improved. See What's New in Family Historian 8 for a list of new features and enhancements.
Copyright Notice
All parts of this Family Historian User Manual are copyright © Calico Pie Limited, 2002-2026.