Family Historian 8 is here – our most ambitious upgrade yet, with major new features and enhancements across almost every part of the program. This page covers what’s new since Family Historian 7. If you’re new to Family Historian, or would simply like a full overview of everything the program can do, take the Tour instead.

At a Glance

• Smart Folders – we believe, a genealogy world first: your data automatically organised into customisable folders
• FamilySearch – full support, including the new user trees
• New mapping tools – draw shapes and text on any map, add overlays such as historic county boundaries, and save maps for your reports and books
• AI Connector – not just advice: your AI assistant can work directly in your project, with you in full control
• Family Historian Mobile – a free companion app for Family Historian 8: available now for Android (public beta), with an iPhone version in development
• Do more with addresses – with map locations, pictures, descriptions, reports, and a new book section
• Redesigned queries – more powerful, and easier to use
• New All Relatives Narrative report – includes all relatives of the subject person
• Next level sources & citations – with free form sources, customisation, Smart Folders and more
• Diagram enhancements – including a major graphics update
• Better books – including support for scrapbooks and photo books
• 64-bit architecture – better performance and much larger projects, reports, books & charts
• Support for non-family relationships – such as friendship groups, enslavement, and more
• LDS Church support – all the tools that church members need
• New licensing & pricing options – including low-cost entry options
• Install v8 alongside your existing version – try it now without giving up version 7
• New Free Edition – adds more possibilities for sharing and collaboration
• And many more exciting new features and improvements…

Smart Folders

• Smart Folders are a major Family Historian innovation and, we believe, a genealogy world first. We are not aware of any comparable feature anywhere else. Smart Folders allow all of your data to be automatically organised into customisable folders, instantly surfacing the interesting and important information that it contains. Smart Folders offer valuable insights and perspectives with records of all types, but perhaps are especially valuable when used with sources and citations. See Next Level Sources & Citations.
• Every record listing – that is, every tab in the Record Window, and every record selector dialog – now has a pane for displaying Smart Folders, which can be opened by clicking this icon (top-left):
• Create your own custom sets of Smart Folders to display information organised in whatever way you want.
• Smart Folders can also be viewed (and custom folder sets can be modified) in the Query Window. In the Query Window, any query type can be organised into Smart Folders, including not just records but also citations, witnesses (shared events) and facts.

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FamilySearch

• FamilySearch is a nonprofit organisation and website, offering free global resources for all genealogists everywhere.  It has more than 1.7 billion individual records in its main (global) tree.  It is now fully supported within Family Historian.  Users have to sign up for a free FamilySearch account to make use of the functionality.  To learn more about FamilySearch, see the FamilySearch Wikipedia page.
• FamilySearch has recently introduced the ability to have shared user trees.  You can create your own trees, public or private, and share them in a controlled way with whoever you wish.  User trees are also fully supported within Family Historian. You can upload any project to FamilySearch as a user tree.
• Individuals in your projects can be (persistently) matched with individuals in a FamilySearch tree – either the global tree or a user tree. You can easily see where the records overlap and differ, and make changes in either direction – updating your Family Historian records from FamilySearch, or vice versa. None of your data is transferred to FamilySearch unless you explicitly opt to do that. You can use FamilySearch as a read-only resource if you wish to. It is entirely up to you, and under your full control.
• You can opt to receive FamilySearch hints about historical records for matched Individuals. It is also possible to receive hints about possible duplication, and/or hints about unmatched Individuals in your projects who may have a match in a FamilySearch tree.
• You can download entire family trees from FamilySearch – into a new or existing project.
• There is a new workspace window specifically for managing FamilySearch searches, matches and updates. You can optionally ‘float’ this window, so that it can be easily used in conjunction with any other workspace window. Suppose, for example, you are working on a chart and want to see all the information held within FamilySearch trees about a given person, you can view this in the floating window, with no need to switch away from the chart.

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New Mapping Tools

• You can now add shapes – such as lines, polylines, polygons, circles or text – to any map. Areas and regions can be highlighted without obscuring the underlying details. Shapes can be formatted, grouped and ordered with respect to one another. You also have full multi-level undo/redo with all shape edits.
• When you zoom in or out of a map, the shapes zoom in and out too, exactly like any other map feature, but with special-handling for text. Text shapes are anchored to particular points on the map, and can have callouts, which are lines connecting the text box to their anchor point. You control how text is zoomed so that it appears in an appropriate size in all contexts.
• Shapes can be locked in position, so that they behave as if part of the underlying map. A new ‘Access’ button on the map toolbar, allows locked shapes to be accessed, so that they can be selected, edited, moved and deleted.
• Maps now support overlays. An overlay is a way of annotating and marking distinctive features on maps. The program comes with a number of standard overlays, such as the historic counties of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as overlays which mark the boundaries of the former Soviet Union, the boundaries of the Roman Empire, and the boundaries of the U.S. at the start of the Civil War. Easily create your own custom overlays using map shapes (especially polygons and text). All shape collections can be saved as overlays. You can also import Family Historian overlays created by others, or import overlay files in a standard format (geoJSON) from the Internet.
• Markers (little icons, with various shapes and colours, which are used to mark locations on maps) have been extended to support addresses and have been made more intuitive and easier to use. You can optionally display text for each marker, and there are new features relating to them – such as the ability to mark events within a fixed distance of a specified point.
• The Marker Set pane has been redesigned to make it easier to view and manage multiple marker sets simultaneously. Marker sets can be copied and pasted, and hidden and shown.
• You can save and re-use maps and overlays. Map images can also be saved as Media records or image files, making it easy to incorporate them into reports, books and websites. 

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AI Connector: Your AI Assistant, Working in Your Project

• The new AI Connector is an installable plugin for version 8 that lets Claude, or another compatible AI assistant, work directly with your project data.
• It’s not just advice and reports. With read-write access, your AI assistant can do real work in your project. It can follow your instructions, read source images, search the Internet and your data, discuss uncertainties with you, transcribe source text and update your records. When it has finished, it can give you a list of the changes it made, for you to check.
• Just ask. For example: “List all the men in my project who were of conscription age during World War I.” “Here’s a scan of my grandfather’s birth certificate – record everything in it, with a proper source citation.” “Find everyone whose married and maiden names are recorded inconsistently, and suggest fixes.” “Check my whole project for impossible dates and other errors, and go through them with me.”
• You have full control. Access is only enabled while the AI Connector is running. When you start it, you choose read-only or read-write access. If you allow changes, you can still undo all of them when you close it.
• It’s built into Family Historian. The AI Connector works through Family Historian itself, using its API (“application programming interface”), rather than editing your project file directly. We know of no other commercial genealogy program with an API comparable to Family Historian’s.
• It’s entirely optional. Family Historian works exactly as before without it. To use it, you’ll need your own account with an AI service such as Claude, and some features may need a paid plan. Any information the AI reads from your project is sent to that service, so check its privacy terms.

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Family Historian Mobile: Your Family Tree on Your Phone

• Family Historian Mobile is a free companion app for Family Historian 8. It is available now for Android, as a public beta, and an iPhone version is in development.
• It puts your whole family tree in your pocket. The app gives you quick, easy read-only access to all your project data – people, relationships, events, dates, sources, citations, pictures and more. You can view relatives in diagrams, and see events marked on maps.
• It’s made for version 8. Family Historian 8 can create a compact copy of your project especially for the app, with pictures scaled down to a size that suits a phone.
• It’s easy to keep up to date. One of the simplest ways to keep the app in sync with your desktop project is to share the data using a cloud drive, such as Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive.
• You can download it free from the Family Historian Mobile page. Because the app isn’t yet in the Google Play Store, Android will show a security warning when you install it. Our step-by-step instructions explain what to expect. We expect the app to be available from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store in future.

Phone images created using MockUPhone

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Do More With Addresses (and Places)

Background: Family Historian allows you to record not only the place of the event (for example: ‘Greenwich, London, England’), but optionally also the actual address within that. This can be a literal address (’14 Main Street’), or some other kind of detailed specification of the exact location – such as a hospital name or the plot location of a grave in a cemetery.

• Previously you could only record the exact map location for places. Now you can do this for addresses too.
• Previously you could only store pictures and descriptions of places. Now you can do this for addresses too.
• Within a book or booklet, you can now add a separate section for the addresses mentioned in the book, with images and text. You can also now do this with places.
• Reports, books, queries, Smart Folders and mapping tools open up a world of possibilities for recording and presenting information about addresses and the people who lived there.

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Redesigned Queries

Queries are all about getting answers to your questions about your data: “Which of my ancestors died of cancer?”, “Which family members lived in Scotland in the 19th C?”. Queries are a powerful tool for getting the answer to any and all of your questions.

• Queries have been redesigned and are now simultaneously more powerful and easier to use and to understand. Old-style queries are still fully supported and are automatically converted to the new format.
• The query columns you want are now easier to find and insert. Commonly-used functions (expressions for retrieving complex and derived information) are now listed in the Columns tab – in addition to field names – and can be easily inserted into queries using drag-and-drop.
• Filters – including filter combinations and conditions – are easier to create and to understand.
• There is a new window for organising and managing queries, which allows easy selection and filtering of queries, as well as allowing queries to be run, viewed, renamed, cloned, deleted, and imported or exported.
• There are 9 new standard queries (such as a query to find addresses linked to a given list of Individuals) and 3 new query types – for addresses, witnesses (shared events), and source citations.

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New All Relatives Narrative Report

• A major new report – the All Relatives Narrative report – includes all relatives of a subject person, in narrative format, organised by generation, with the youngest generation first.
• The new report optionally includes a section showing ancestors and descendants of the subject person, for easy reference.
• Each section on each person includes how they are related to the subject person.
• When a relation wants to know what information you have about their relatives, you can now just generate an All Relatives Narrative report for them, and send it to them as a PDF file. It’s all there.

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Next Level Sources & Citations

• As mentioned above, Smart Folders offer great benefits in all contexts. But they are particularly useful for organising and displaying information about sources and citations. You can have whatever kind of organisational structure you want (see example, right). If you use source templates, the standard folder set for Source records will automatically generate Smart Folders that reflect the structure and content of your source templates – including any custom source templates of your own. Each Smart Folder can have its own set of content-specific columns. This again is particularly useful when dealing with sources, where the type of stored information can vary considerably.
• Previously Family Historian has supported two types of Source record: generic and templated.  There is now a third type: free form. Free form sources allow sources and citations to be simply entered in an unstructured way as text, using bold, italics and underline where needed.
• All source citations, of all types, can now be fully customised in the Citation Window.
• The Bibliography section of reports and books has also been improved and made more flexible. Now you can customise a bibliography entry at the Source record level, and at the citation level. Where previously it just generated an entry for each Source record, now the Bibliography section looks at the complete list of generated bibliography entries and effectively merges all identical entries. This means that lumpers can have multiple bibliography entries for a single source, if they wish to (by associating different bibliography entries with different citations), and splitters can allow multiple Source records to share a single bibliography entry if they wish to do that (see terminology note below).
• Family Historian 8 introduces a new “prioritize compatibility” export option, which exports full details of source citations using standard GEDCOM fields – so any program can import them, whatever your source type. This matters because GEDCOM (the standard format for shared genealogy data) doesn’t natively support source templates, free form sources, or customised citations, so those details could otherwise be lost when exporting to another program. The new option works with all source types – generic, free form or templated, customised or not.

Terminology: In the genealogy world, a ‘splitter’ is a genealogist who favours having many, detailed Source records to represent real-world sources, where a ‘lumper’ prefers a small number of large-scope Source records. For example, a splitter might have one Source record for each census entry in a particular census, where a lumper might have one Source record for the entire census. Most genealogists are a mixture of the two.

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Diagram Enhancements

• Graphics update: The underlying graphics engine has been completely reworked with new technology that features faster display of diagrams, and improvements to their appearance. The new technology supports ‘hardware-acceleration’ which means that it takes advantage of underlying graphics hardware (GPU) to deliver optimum performance.
• There have been improvements to numerous features of diagrams. For example, there are new display effects for diagram boxes, you can now create your own custom presets for box appearance, there have been improvements to the design of fan charts and pedigree charts, and you now have full undo/redo to all edits with diagram ‘shapes’ (text boxes, polygons, lines, and so on).
• Standard diagrams have been given a new look, incorporating some of the new display features. But you still have easy access to the old look, if desired.
• Diagrams now work much better with books (see Better Books, next).

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Better Books

• Books can now have “Address List” and “Place List” sections to provide pictures and descriptions of the addresses and places mentioned in the book.
• There is a new “Pedigree Chart (as booklet)” report. This creates the report as a booklet. You can also now add a pedigree chart to any book. You can revise the pedigree chart options as required at any time (not just when adding the chart to the book).
• There is much improved support for integrating diagrams with books. You can now edit a diagram even after it has been added to a book. A new feature called “book layout compatibility” ensures that the page layout of charts or diagrams is kept compatible with a given book, so that multi-page diagrams fit perfectly into a given book, regardless of how many pages they use. So, for example, a 5-page diagram will take up exactly 5 book pages. This compatibility is automatically maintained with charts and diagrams that have been added to a book; but even with diagrams or charts that have not yet been inserted into a book, you can adjust their page layout to ensure compatibility with any given book.
• You can now easily create a scrapbook or photo book, using images and text that you put together yourself. The scrapbook or photo book can be an entire book, or a section of a book. The Windows snipping tool (now accessible from the Tools menu) allows you to quickly snip parts of a chart, diagram or map.  These can be added to a project as a Media record or inserted directly into a scrapbook.
• As mentioned above (see Next Level Sources & Citations), the Bibliography section of books (and reports) has been improved and made more flexible.
• Book indices now index the people in all charts, including tree diagrams, fan charts, pedigree charts etc.

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64-bit Architecture

• Family Historian 8 can now handle much larger projects, and much larger reports, books, diagrams and charts, thanks to a new 64-bit architecture. It also means significant performance improvements in many cases, especially with large projects.
• Backups have also been enhanced to remove previous size limitations.
• Family Historian 8 requires a 64-bit version of Windows. Almost all modern Windows computers are 64-bit. To check yours, go to Settings > System > About and look at System type.

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Support for Non-Family Relationships

• Family Historian has long supported witnesses – that is, non-principal participants in an event, such as the best man at a marriage or a beneficiary to a will.  That support has been extended and made even more powerful.  The new functionality makes it possible to easily record relationships of any kind.  For example, the program now has built-in support for friend lists (a list of all of a person’s friends), friendship groups (a group of people who were all friends of one another), and enslavement facts – each of which is a record of one or more people who were enslaved, and optionally also the person or persons who enslaved them.
• Create your own custom relationships of any kind. These can be one-to-one relationships (something like a marriage), one-to-many relationships (teacher and pupils, say), or many-to-many relationships (friendship groups or enslavement); and the parties can have the same or different roles, as required.

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LDS Church Support

• Family Historian now has extensive features to meet the needs of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. These features are normally hidden (they only have relevance to LDS Church members) but are enabled by an option in Preferences.
• The new features include support for recording LDS Ordinances. Like any other data, this information can be included in reports, books, charts or websites, and explored and analysed using queries.
• When LDS Church support is enabled, the new FamilySearch workspace window has an additional Ordinances tab (see image) for managing integration with FamilySearch with respect to ordinances.

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New Licensing & Pricing Options

• We now offer Family Historian as a subscription – either annual or monthly. Active subscribers are always entitled to the latest version of the program.
• Not sure if it’s for you? Why not start with a low-cost monthly subscription.
• Perpetual licences for version 8 are also available, if preferred.
• Upgrading from an earlier version? Version 7 users currently get a 25% discount, and version 5 and 6 users a 10% discount, on a perpetual version 8 licence. See Pricing & Upgrades.

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Install v8 Alongside Your Existing Version

• Family Historian 8 is now installed alongside your existing installation of version 7 (or whichever earlier version you have), so you can try it out without having to give up your old version.
• When you install version 8, your preferred settings, together with all customisations, are automatically copied to the new installation.
• When you first open a version 7 project in version 8, you’ll be asked to upgrade it, and a snapshot of the project as it was, is kept automatically – so you can always go back.

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New Free Edition

• The new Free Edition has a much smaller feature set than the full version (see Compare Free Edition and Full Version), but you can use it to view and browse any Family Historian project. And you can use it to make any data changes, additions or deletions that you want. This means that you can give family members copies of your project data and they can install the Free Edition to view it. If they spot any mistakes or omissions, they can make the corrections and return the updated project data to you. Collaboration and sharing just got that much easier.

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And Many More Exciting New Features and Improvements…

• New reports: in addition to the new All Relatives Narrative report, there are also new Address List and Place List reports (mentioned in Better Books above, as these reports have special uses in a Book context), and a new Register report which uses the traditional ‘register style’ layout.
• Focus Window Customisation: You can now customise the Focus Window, by adding up to 2 additional lines of fully customisable text, to parent and grandparent boxes. You can also add an additional customised column to the children listing. You can now also optionally display place information for child births and deaths.
• One-click Column Sorting: support for one-click toggle column sorting, when you click on the column heading in lists, has been added throughout the program. For example, this is supported in Records Window listings, in record selector dialogs, in the Query Window results tab, in Smart Folders, and elsewhere.
• Easier Access to Record Links: the Record Links window shows, at a glance, all the links to any record – a feature some of our most experienced users rely on constantly. It’s now much easier to find: just right-click on any record in any record listing, or in the Focus Window, or in any cell for a record in the Query Window results tab, and you’ll see ‘Record Links’, right above ‘Properties’ in the dropdown menu.
• Record Listing Improvements: some improvements to record lists have already been mentioned – such as one-click column sorting, easier access to record links, and support for Smart Folders. But that’s only part of it. In addition to all of these, record lists now support left, middle and right alignments on columns (right-click on the Records Window and choose ‘Configure Columns’). You now also have the option to always sort Null values last (enabled by default). The first column is now ‘locked’ by default so you can scroll horizontally without losing context. And text filters in the Records Window now support ‘wildcards’ (such as * and ?).
• New Search Tool for Projects, Backup Files and GEDCOM Files: a new tool on the Project Window supports searches for Family Historian projects, backup files and GEDCOM files. You can search your entire computer, the documents folder or within any user-specified folder; and you can restore or open files from the search results window.
• New Backup and Restore Settings Tool: ‘Settings’ in this context means modified or custom fact type definitions, queries, diagrams, reports, and text schemes, as well as record flags, language packs, diagram box icons, accent files, plugins, program preferences and configurations, and much more. All settings can be backed up to a file, for easy transfer to another computer. The new tool can be accessed from the ‘More Tasks’ button on the Project Window.
• Improvements to the Media Window: Individuals, families, places, sources, facts, source citations and submitters, can all be linked to pictures and other media items.  Previously, with individuals, families, places, and sources, you could create these links from either end.  That is, you could link either from the data item to the media item (for example, by adding the link in the Media tab of the Property Box), or from the media item to the data item (by clicking ‘Add Frame Link’ or ‘Add Simple Link’ in the Media Window).  With facts, source citations and submitters, however, the link could only be created from the data item to the media item, and not from the media item to the data item.  Both ways of creating these links are now supported.  That is, if you click ‘Add Frame Link’ or ‘Add Simple Link’ in the Media Window, you will be able to create all of these kinds of links. You can now also link addresses to media items, and, again, the link can be created either from the address to the media item, or from the media item to the address.
• ‘Auto-list’ Delivers Faster Data Entry: Family Historian has long supported auto-complete on many fields. In addition, it now supports a new feature called auto-list. Auto-list means that as you start typing, Family Historian will display a dropdown list of values (of the relevant field type) that match the characters you have typed so far. If you see the value you want in the list, you can click on it, or use the arrow keys and press Enter or Tab. In tests, this made data entry significantly easier and faster.
• More Undo/Redo: in previous versions you have had full multi-level undo/redo for all changes to data (fields and records). Now you also have full multi-level undo/redo for all editing of diagram shapes in the Diagram Window, and map shapes in the Map Window. [Note: ‘shapes’ in this context means added items such as arrows, lines, polygons, text boxes, images and so on. Different shapes are supported in different contexts. Support for shapes in maps is new in version 8 – see New Mapping Tools above.]
• More Drag-and-drop: in addition to the many contexts previously supported, you can now use drag-and-drop to insert, move or copy columns in the Columns tab of the Query Window, or to move or copy filters (including entire groups of filters) in the Filters tab. You can use it to insert, move or copy columns when configuring columns in the Records Window. And you can now insert images into diagrams using drag-and-drop.
• Easier, Faster Web Clipping: You can now access the Windows Snipping Tool from the Tools menu. The Windows Snipping Tool allows you to click-and-drag anywhere on the screen to select an area that you wish to copy as an image to the clipboard.  New options make it easier than ever to insert a copied image into a project (or into a diagram).
• Custom Fact Flags: Version 7 introduced the ability to set flags on any fact (event or attribute). Facts could be flagged as Private, Preferred, Tentative or Rejected. Now in version 8 you can create your own custom fact flags.
• Improved Support for High Resolution Monitors: Numerous improvements have been made throughout the program to ensure that graphics, icons and other visual elements are optimally sized on high resolution monitors.
• Expression Entry Assistant Tool: this is an improved version of the old Data Reference Assistant tool.  The old tool only helped with entry of data references. The improved version also helps with the entry of built-in functions – hence the name change.  Frequently-used function calls are grouped in a section labelled “Common Functions”. No understanding of functions is required to use the function expressions. Just select the one you require and press ‘OK’ to insert it. The behaviour of each function expression is explained in a box below the list when you select the function call. The Expression Entry Assistant tool is available in all contexts where the old Data Reference Assistant tool had been available.
• New Features and Improvements for Power-Users: The many improvements here include a new special plugin type called a ‘Smart Folder Plugin’, which gives great flexibility in creating Smart Folders. There are new API functions, including functions for accessing named lists. 21 new built-in functions have been added, all of which can also be used in plugins. And the Plugin Help has been extended and improved.
• And many more improvements and enhancements…

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Ready to Get Started?

Already using Family Historian? Version 7 users currently get a 25% discount, and version 5 and 6 users a 10% discount, on a perpetual version 8 licence, and version 8 installs alongside your existing copy – see Install v8 Alongside Your Existing Version above.

New to Family Historian? Take a full tour of the program, or start with a free 30-day trial.