I've been reading & watching videos for days and am not finding an answer to this ... Not "which is better" but "which is better for the following..."
I'm an Ancestry.com user reasonably pleased with it, for the past 18 months.
The reason I'm considering desktop software is:
- Can you say "ADDICTED" ? (to the hobby)
- Complement Ancestry.com
- ***Most importantly*** I'm going to see my grandmother in a few weeks and it was hard sharing with her last year with just my iPad and the Ancestry website. I'd like to gather notes & documents from her, photos, etc, without making them public on Ancestry. I'd like a software program that helps make a book (in FTM it seems you have to buy a plug-in? Can you get a rudimentary book out of it without?). My Microsoft Word / etc skills are advanced but it'd be nice if it was a one-click thing.
- It'd be nice if I could leave my grandmother with a copy of the software and access (through my Ancestry.com account) to research. It'd need to be fairly hassle free for her to use it.
- I like the idea of adding multimedia to the tree but that's not a huge thing.
- I'd prefer to just buy software once, and have it be something that supports me in being a better genealogist learning to use more resources besides Ancestry.com and Google.
- I'm happy to pay more for something that makes it easier. I'm a single working mom with a small child and while I'm pretty good working intuitively, I don't have time
- I'd like it to not require dozens of steps to do things that are important (for instance I read that merging duplicate people can be hard on one - but is it really if it's syncing?)
- Being able to automatically sync my tree with other websites would help me collaborate with other researchers despite not having a million years to maintain the separate trees (I *am* working on my GEDCOM upload here, really I am, but WHEW!)
- Any ideas at all that help me share my work with my grandmother without her buying memberships or having an aggravating interface are appreciated. And she's really going to want a book.
- On the book thing again: All 4 of my grandparents are living, and I kind of want to print out a book single-sided and ask them over the next few years to flip through and add handwritten notes in the blank sheet facing each page, of what they remember. Then these books will become source documents themselves, in a way! But I'd need to do this in the next 2 weeks.
Thank you!
