All full (non-trial) versions of Family Historian from version 3 to version 6 required a licence key. If you have lost your licence key but still have a working copy of the old version of the software installed on a computer, you can use the following instructions to retrieve the key. Please note that these instructions will only work for licences for the currently installed version. For example, if version 6 is installed and still works, you should be able to retrieve the version 6 licence key. Once you have upgraded that version, however, you will no longer be able to retrieve the version 6 licence key. The same applies to versions 3, 4 and 5.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR RETRIEVING KEY FROM EXISTING INSTALLATION
The following instructions may not precisely fit all versions of Windows (there are some small differences) but hopefully you should still be able to work out what you need to do.
Right click on the Family Historian icon on your desktop and select Properties. There should be an input box labelled ‘Target’ which will look similar to this:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Family Historian\Program\fh.exe”
Add a space and the word ‘info’ (without the quotes) to the end of the line (after the closing double quote) to give:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Family Historian\Program\fh.exe” info
Click the OK button and then double click the icon to run Family Historian. A window labelled ‘INFO’ will appear with the text “This program is registered to:” followed by codes on 2 lines. You can use the mouse to highlight the codes and hit CTRL-C to copy to the clipboard. Then paste this into Notepad to save a copy.
Once you have completed the process and verified your license, right-click on the the Family Historian icon on your desktop once again, and again select Properties. Remove the word “info” from the end of the line in the ‘Target’ box, and press OK.
If you own the download version of the software (bought from the Family Historian website), you will already have the licence name and key, which is what you need. If you own a boxed or CD version of the software (bought from Amazon or from a reseller), you need to follow the instructions below.
Once you have got your licence, please edit the desktop icon again and remove the “info” from the end of the path.
Calculating the Key for the Boxed Version
With the boxed version, the codes that you now have, on 2 lines, should look like this:
AAAAAA
BBBBBB-BBBBBB-BBBBBB-BBBBBB
…where the As and Bs just represent the numbers and letters in your code. You need to re-arrange these letters to get your proper code. To do it copy the whole thing to a word-processor or text editor, to make it easier. And insert the entire group from the first line into the second line, after the first character on the second line. Then insert an additional hyphen after what is now the 6th character, to evenly split the code into 5 groups of 6 characters/numbers (with no spaces anywhere). So your code should now read:
BAAAAA-ABBBBB-BBBBBB-BBBBBB-BBBBBB
So, for example, if the codes shown had looked like this:
123456
ABCDEF-GHIJKL-MNOPQR-STUVWX
Then after rearranging they should now look like this:
A12345-6BCDEF-GHIJKL-MNOPQR-STUVWX
This is your licence key. If asked for the “Licence Name” as well, please enter your full name.