Ancestral Quest
List of Features
Grow Your Family Tree with Ease
- Intuitive Family Building screens
- Intuitive screens for editing individuals and marriages
- Quick Entry features minimize repetitive typing
- Keyboard shortcuts let you do most tasks without the mouse and dramatically speed up entry of information
- TreeTips™ Hinting technology built into Ancestral Quest will search the world's major repositories of genealogical records and let you know if there are any records for you to examine
- TreeTips™ Advanced Searching on Ancestry.com lets you quickly access research submitted by others
- TreeTips™ Advanced Searching on MyHeritage.com and FamilySearch.org
- Unlimited spouses per person
- Unlimited children per family
- Unlimited parents per child
- Record step parent situations, ie: mother is biological, father is adoptive, step, or foster
- Record relationships as Married, Not Married, Common Law or de Facto
- Mark children, parents, spouses and relationships as “Confidential”, so they won't print on reports
- Mark an Individual as having never married
- Mark a relationship as having never had any children
- Record Name, Titles, Birth, Christening, Death, Burial for each person
- Record current address, contact information for each person
- Record custom ID, Cause of Death, Physical Description, AKA for each person
- Change the title of the “Birth-Rite” event (usually called Christening, but often something like “Baptism”, “Blessing”, “Circumcision”) for each person
- Unlimited “Other Events” for each person — things like Emigration, Census, Probate
- Mark “Other Events” as Confidential
- Scores of predefined “Other Event” types, and you can define your own
- Ancestral Quest comes with the work “Line Upon Line - A Beginner's Guide to Genealogy” by Margery Bell to get you up and running with your genealogy immediately.
Share Your Information
- Print Reports
- Create Web Pages
- Export Your Data to GEDCOM
- Include Scrapbook items right in GEDCOM
- During import, create a source record to be attached to each imported record
- Create reports to PDF files to send in e-mail or to make available on web pages
Document Your Family History
- Unlimited Notes for each individual and family
- Spell Check Notes
- Easy to Use, yet Professional quality Source Documentation system
- Categorize Sources
- View where any source has been cited
- Memorize and reuse up to 9 source citations
- Connect a source citation to multiple events
- Assign a source citation to just the date or
place for specific documentation
- Store and print images of source documents (birth certificates, census pages, etc)
- Unique “Documentation Center” lets you manage all the documentation — both notes and sources — for an individual or family from a single screen
- Mark notes as Confidential
- Store data (Notes, dates, names, places) in any language
- Record DNA test results
- Store Photos, Audio clips, Video clips, Other documents
- Combine Photos and Audio into choreographed slide shows with audio background (narration or music)
- Attach a sound to each picture, such as a narration
- Store scrapbook items on the Internet or locally
Work with Others
- Unique NetFam™ Collaboration — work together with others anywhere in the world using a single master database shared privately over the Internet
- Synchronize your data with the Family Tree of FamilySearch.org, a public Internet-based database
- Export/Import using GEDCOM
- Compare and Merge Databases — bring in ONLY the changed or new data
- Publish a Family Book, by combining many charts and reports listed below with other documents, histories, etc., that you have from other sources. Build a master Table of Contents and master Index for this publication
- Single and Cascading Pedigree Charts with or without photos, in 4, 5 or 6 generation layouts
- Documentation pages with the Pedigree Charts, including images of source documents
- Blank Pedigree Charts
- Fan Charts up to 13 generations — full circle, half circle, quarter circle — printed on paper as wide and tall as you
can find — typically 3 to 4 feet wide
- Single and Cascading Family Group Sheets with or without photos
- Family Group Sheets can be documented with notes and sources, and even with source images
- Ancestry charts
- Ancestry Wall charts with or without photos
- Ancestry charts with siblings of each ancestor
- Descendant single line charts
- Descendant Wall charts with or without photos
- Descendant Dropline charts with many options
- Narrative book reports, both for ancestors (Ahnentafel report) and descendants (Modified Register report) — printed
to the Printer, to PDF File, text file, or to Word or WordPerfect files
- Option to print “fill-in-the-blanks” for missing information on Book reports
- Individual Summary pages
- Scrapbook pages
- Custom reports — these can be previewed, printed, or sent to a CSV file for import into database programs (like Access)
and spreadsheets
- Line of Descent drop-line chart
- Birthday/Anniversary Calendar
- Research Log
- Several Lists
- Unlinked Individuals in file
- Possible Duplicate Individuals in file
- Lists of Individuals by name or record number
- Lists of Marriages by name of husband, wife, or record number
- Potential problems report (and mark individuals so they won't appear on this report in the future)
- List of End-of-Line individuals
- List of addresses for Family Reunion mailings
- Lists of places, sorted, and with or without
details of events taking place in each location
- List of scrapbook items
- LDS Ordinance reports
- Print lists of Sources
- Print lists of Citations for a Source
- Most reports can be printed to PDF file
- Most reports can be printed to a text file
- Print just Odd or Even pages to help with two-sided printing
- Print reports in any language -- after obtaining a separate language module (or translating one yourself)
Organize Your Research
- Sophisticated To Do item entry
- Management system for research To-Do items
- Research Log report lets you organize tasks by location, type, or almost anything
Review Your Information
- Print reports to take with you in your research notebook
- Review lists of Citations for a Source
- Sort lists of information any way you want (both on the custom report and on the Name List view)
- View and edit multiple files side-by-side
- Individual Summary screen lets you review ALL information about an individual on one screen
- TreeTips™ Advanced Searching on Ancestry.com (best use of this if you have a subscription to Ancestry.com, though you can gain some value without a subscription)
- Compare your data to data on the Family Tree of FamilySearch.org
- Ability to create your own link to any Internet search site
Tools/Special Features
- Take the Ancestral Quest program with you on a flash or other removable drive, using AQ2Go! (Only available in Windows versions.)
- Relationship Examiner — calculate up to 100 relationships between any two people, and view line of descent from common ancestor
- Date Calculator — enter birth date and age to get death date, or vice versa
- Soundex Calculator
- Always see relationships of each person to the root person of the file
- Translate AQ into any language, or install a language module already translated by another
- Auto Generate ID numbers — Ahnentafel and Henry numbering — the unique combination of these provides the relationship for anyone in the file, even those not related by blood. Dollarhide numbering is available
- Merge Individuals — Auto matching to help identify duplicates
- Auto Merge on ID, FSPID or Global ID
- Merge Sources
- Merge Repositories
- Merge Citations
- Change Log — Keep a log of all changes made in detail — if you are collaborating, it records the User ID of the person making the change. Print the log to file.
- Global Find/Replace of Notes, Names, Dates and Places
- Convert UPPER case surnames to Mixed case
- Convert US/Canadian state/province codes to full names and back
- Back and Forward buttons to return to a recent view
- Make copies of databases
- Split databases
- Backup and Restore
- Recently edited files list accessible under the File menu
- Bookmark key individuals for quick lookup
- Simple finds on basic sorted information
- Advanced filtering/focusing to find individuals or groups
- Lookup by marriage
- Find individuals based on how they are related to others
- Record standard LDS ordinances
- Synchronize with FamilySearch.org
- Specific search filters for locating missing ordinances
- Reports for missing individual and family ordinances
- Update ordinance information from FamilySearch Family Tree
- Display Ordinance codes on Children List in Family screen
- Predefined Jewish events
- Produce Page of Testimony to preserve memory of Holocaust victims
PAF Compatibility
- Full database compatibility with PAF 5
- Direct import of PAF 2.1 – 2.31, PAF 3 and PAF 4 databases
Requirements