Family Historian 5 Delayed – March, 2012

Family Historian 5, a Windows genealogy application published by Calico Pie Limited, has been delayed from this month (February 2012) until March, 2012, according to an email list I’m on. It was a brief announcement:

Version 5 of Family Historian had been due for release in February, but is now expected to be released in March.

Family Historian Version 5 is being touted as a major upgrade to the Family Historian series, and because of the delay and because it’s a major upgrade, they have an offer of a free upgrade to version 5 if you purchased Family Historian version 4 on or after November 10th, 2011. This includes both download and boxed (from participating retailers/stockists) versions.

The list of qualifying stockists/retailers, along with the offer details are here: Family-Historian.co.uk/v5-offer.

They did include a couple of “quick peeks” at Family Historian 5:


They come in half, quarter or full sizes. And since this is Family Historian, you can of course double-click on any box to view and update that person’s details in the Property Box. You have a choice of pre-defined content options, but you can configure fan charts for whatever contents or colours you like. You can add trees to fan chart diagrams and vice versa. If you want, you can even pull them to pieces and design your own complex custom fan charts.

There was also a peak at data entry validation:


We’ve worked hard to improve data entry and data validation. In previous versions, dates were only validated if you pressed the Tab key. Now they are fully validated when the cursor leaves the field – whether you tab away or click away. If Family Historian doesn’t recognise a date, you will always get a chance to put it right. As Family Historian now accepts dates in a much wider range of formats, it’s much less likely to fail to recognise a date anyway. And if the date is valid but looks inconsistent with other data, a balloon tip will warn you (see example above). To get rid of a balloon tip, click on it anywhere or press the Escape key, or just tab or click back to the field it points to.

For a full list of new features, see this list at Family-Historian.co.uk.