The Master Genealogist has for nearly 20 years been a favourite genealogy program for those wanting the most advanced and capable product to record and present their family history research. Sadly the developer has recently announced the end of the road for development and support of this program – from the end of 2014. Some TMG users will continue to use it for some time to come. Others will want to change to an alternative. Family Historian has for some time been probably the most innovative and exciting genealogy program available – one we are a great fan of. If you are looking for an alternative to TMG, then we consider Family Historian to be the best alternative. It already has features supporting the import of TMG data. But the great news is that the next version will go a lot further to support the one feature that TMG users really value.
Simon Orde, the creator of Family Historian has written the following for us to post here:
Following the recent announcement that TMG will be discontinued, TMG users who are now looking for another program to switch to, should consider Family Historian. We have long supported direct import from TMG into Family Historian (i.e. not just via GEDCOM). We may even be the only genealogy program to do so – and we support all versions. Since the TMG announcement, there has been a big upsurge in interest in Family Historian from TMG users. In the light of feedback from TMG users, we have already made improvements to our direct import to make it even more comprehensive.
We urge TMG users to try out for themselves importing their data into Family Historian, to see how comprehensive our import is. You can download a free trial of Family Historian from http://www.family-historian.co.uk/downloads/v5-30-day-trial. To import your data, click ‘New Project’ on the Project Window, choose “Import from other family tree file” and select your TMG database. The 12-step import includes individuals, families, relationships, names, facts, dates, memos, exhibits, sources, repositories, source citations, flags, and more. Family Historian currently does not support witnesses, but we have committed to including full support for witnesses in the next major version (v6) of Family Historian when this is released. For now though, the v5 import stores the data about witnesses in a note (memo) attached to each relevant fact or event, and includes the record Id of the witness in a hidden field. When v6 is released, we will write a Family Historian plugin for TMG users who have already imported using v5, to convert the notes about witness details into full-blown witness data (hence the importance of the hidden record Ids which are needed to make this possible).
Family Historian is a powerful and extremely configurable program. It has won numerous awards, and regularly comes top in detailed product comparison group tests. We believe that it is the ideal program for TMG users to switch to. To learn more, see http://www.family-historian.co.uk/support/faq-tmg.
So if you are a TMG user, and you’re not sure what to do … take a few minutes to have a look at this Introduction of Family Historian video.
To see the Family Historian products we sell, click here.
Can I go on a mailing list for when your new version comes out. With a database of 22,000+ and still inputing, I don’t wish to try your current version, but interested when the next one comes out.
Kay Sturgeon
Australia
After viewing the video, no mention was made about back ups. Can you have photos linked externally?
>After viewing the video, no mention was made about back ups. Can you have photos linked externally?
When making backups there are 3 options, so you can exclude or include images from the zip backups, Images can be held within the Project (which makes life easy when moving between machines) or externally. Personally I keep them within the Project folder (they are still discrete files on the disk). Project folders can be kept on Dropbox, Google Drive etc to get automatic backups and sharing between computers if you need it).
oct 6 2014
I am at least 16 yrs searching for the immediate siblings of ichabod mastin born 1818 hastings county ontario. I have his children —
Cornelius, Isreal; elizabeth ann; rebecca jane; Melbourne; jacob manley; Salathiel; and susan perlina.
Ichabod,s father was Cornelius and wife was perlina
b uried in Cameron cemetery
I am 89 yrs old,, and would so much love to fill in the missing pieces.
the homestead was in Tyendinaga near the ebonezer cem Albert
Isreal was my g grand father .
I have had nothing but trouble with Family Historian 5 and their after sales service is so pathetic I will not purchase version 6. FHv5 constantly loses information. I contacted support but the reply I got was useless and was as if they didn’t even bother to read the email I sent.
I am a long term TMG user and decided as a precaution to search for alternative software. I chose Family Historian 6 and did a direct import of my data. I cannot complain about the new software because there doesn’t appear to be any issues causing operating problems. Having said that I did have issues, particularly with media. With TMG I had a mixture of internally and externally saved images. For import I learnt that the images should all be externally saved. I used a utility program with TMG to transfer all internal images to external. However this process changed all the former internal image file names. But I proceeded and the end result was that I had a lot of work to do in Family Historian to not only change file names but to make changes to the linking of files, almost 2000 files. Job is now done and continuing to work on other idiosyncrasies.
Trevor, thanks for your comment, we appreciate feedback from users.