Cumberland Family Tree for Windows
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(This page contains data and information on Ira Lund's Cumberland Family Tree for Windows. I have no interest in Ira's company or products, financial or otherwise. It is just that I have been using Cumberland Family Tree since its inception as a DOS program and have found it to be the easiest to use and most comprehensive of any I have tried. With CFTW, there is no need to download add-ons to get all the things a good genealogy program should have, such as Pedigree Charts, Box Charts, Tiny Tafel builders, Descendant Charts, etc. The interface is intuitive and easy to learn. Using CFTW is just like using any other Windows program/utility, same left-clicks, right-clicks, double-clicks, drop-and-drag, etc.)
Cumberland Family Tree for Windows is the most user-friendly genealogy program available! The major concept of CFTW centers around creating your very own Family History Book. Since the body of body of your book will likely consist of CFTW's unique "Story" reports, which have the capability of taking your dry data - such as dates and places - and structuring them into a delightful readable form. By allowing you to add up to 250 events in a person's life and attaching notes to each of these events, you can easily use this program to write a full and complete biography on each individual in your database! Imagine showing ALL major events of a person's live in this fashion: births, church ordinances (like baptism, christenings, ordinations), schooling, addresses, immigrations, marriages, occupations (even multiple occupations changing throughout a person's life), travels, awards, recognitions, deaths, burials, and any other life event you could think of! (The maximum possibility: 250 events - with 32,000 character notes on each event - could produce more than 2,000 printed pages of biographical materail per individual!!!!!.)
In addition, you can easily document your data with source notes which can be end-noted when printing out the story reports. The Indexed Book will keep track of all individuals as you create your book and, at the end, print an index showing every person in the database, what type of reports they appear on, and the page number!
And, if you think the Indexed Book is a wonderful idea, imagine what it will be like when you add photographs and scanned documents! A wide variety of Photo reports can also be generated:
- Pedigree Charts with Photos.
Descendant Charts with Photos.
Family Group Charts with Photos.
and even a Photo Album.
You can attach up to 250 photos to each individual!!!!!
Here is a run-down of the other major features of CFT for Windows.
- Names up to 80 characters, allowing surnames to be anywhere within the name - first, middle, or last position!
- Enter place names only once. Then select from easy-to-use pop-up screen forever after! Place names can be up to 200 characters long!
- User-definable event fields allow more than just births, marriages, and deaths. Add such events as baptisms, divorces, LDS ordinances, immigration, naturalization, bar mitzvahs, and much more!
- Source notes can be attached to each individual event. They also work like place names - once you enter a source note, you can select it again using a pop-up window. Source notes can be very long, up to 5,000 characters, so you have room to enter an entire book name with author, publisher, date, page numbers, and more. Or, attach a source reference to a document. Documents can be either text or a scanned image.
- Allows multiple marriages - up to 12 marriages per individual!
- The text edit window allows cut, copy, and paste to and from other Windows applications. There is also a powerful spell-check dictionary included! And, you can easily add to the dictionary when the spell-checker comes across a word not listed.
- Keep track of adopted parentage and ancestors in addition to the natural lineage.
- Identify relationships other than marriages; such as Lived Together, Not Married, Significant Other, etc. This allows you to include Divorces, Common-Law Marriages, Single Parents, etc.
- Calculate relationships between individuals. Flag a descendant of a line other than your own, then flag youself and the program automatically tells you the relationship, e.g. Sixth Cousin, Twice Removed.
- Calculate dates and view an external calendar with the Date Calculator.
- GEDCOM Import and Export. Will import a GEDCOM file made with any other genealogy program, as long as the exporting program conforms to industry-wide standards; this includes 99.99% of all programs.
- Tiny Tafel export. Make a Tiny Tafel directly from CFT - you don't have to go through the convoluted and complicated procedure of first exporting a GEDCOM, then building a Tiny Tafel from it, as you do with most other programs.
- Import ASCII text to individual notes or documents.
- Import old CTREE 3.x and CFT-Pro 4.x files. (This allows you to use databases built with any earlier version of Cumberland Family Tree genealogy software.)
- Database Verification Utility will check for many different types of data inconsistency problems or errors.
- Name Case Change Utility will change names from lower case to upper, or from upper case to lower.
- Powerful Database Merge and Database Split Utilities.
Ira has just released Version 2.20 of CFT for Windows. Below is a list showing the new features of v2.20 and improvements of the previous version.
Version 2.20 Improvements:
- Large Button Icons on main screen. The small icons are also still there. In the Program Configuration (Options Menu) you can now select whether you want small or large icons and whether to place them at top or bottom of main window.
- Larger Event List Option. In Database Configuration (Options Menu) you can now select to suppress the viewing of Flags in the Edit Individual Window. This allows the event list to show wider, allowing the display of the second set of dates and BC/AD if needed. Several field widths in the Event List can also now be manually
adjusted with the mouse.
- Foreign Dates are now stored internally in English. "New" foreign users will not notice nor care. (English users never had a problem here.) "Current" foreign users will want to go to the Language Window and translate all month dates back to English. This change allows users to switch languages without re-translating the months. Months will then be auto-translated from the internally stored English to the language of the report choice on screen and reports.
- Auto-Sorting of Dates. There is now a new button in the Edit Individual Window that allows dates for that individual to be auto-sorted. If needed, you can re-adjust after the sort. Empty date events will be kept together with prior events that have valid dates. There is also a new Auto-Sorting Option in the Rebuild.
- Insert Child Bug is fixed. This bug would disconnect "inserted" children from parents during a Rebuild. It is now repaired.
- "Add Child" - still shows up even without a spouse. This allows you to add a child to a single parent. Internally, an FRN (marriage record) gets created when you add the first child, but entry of the spouse is now optional.
- Fix Relationships - now has new features to connect parents and adopted parents. Thus you can now connect and disconnect from both directions: parent to child and child to parent.
- Option for display of Events in Individual Event Editor. Now the Standard Event Editor contains a new option to indicate what is displayed in the last field of the event list in the Individual Edit Window: place name, misc data or spouse name. This is now set for each type of event and can be changed by the user.
- Sensitive Events. Without changing the data structure of the CFT-Win database, you now have the option of using the "sure" field as an indicator of a "sensitive" event. By going to the Database Configuration (Options Menu) and selecting to use this field to represent a "sensitive event" rather than as a sure field, you can now mark events as "sensitive", allowing the suppression of these events on certain reports and GEDCOM export. See Database Configuration for more details.
- Dutch Surname Sorting. Again, a new option in the Database Configuration allows you to sort special Dutch surnames such as "/van der Noot/" on the last name of the surname group. For an existing database, first switch to the Dutch Surname option and then run the Rebuild (Tools Menu).
- Source Editor. Because of continuing problems here, the Source Editor was totally rewritten. Because of the nature of the source file a numeric "queue" is loaded prior to entering the editor - causing a short delay while loading. However, much cleaner operation is now assurred, once in the editor list window.
- Document Image Display. Display of images was not as clear as in individual photos. This has been fixed.
- Import from CFT-Pro. Dates with month with accented characters were not imported correctly. This has now been fixed.
- Accented Characters Window. Have added two characters often used in some countries: 166 and 167 (or 0170, 0176 in Ansel) : "ª and °"
- Rebuild fixes: BC dates used to get cleared during a rebuild. This is now fixed.
- Date Display. "AD" now shows only for dates less than 100 AD. Earlier it showed for dates less than 1000 AD. BC (and AD prior to 100 AD) now show on main window.
- Database Verification. BC dates were not calculated properly. This is now fixed.
- Date Calculator (and other locations). Entry of a date with a leading zero (such as 01 Jan 1990) would cause an additional zero to be added to the day (001 Jan 1990) creating an invalid date. This has now been fixed.
- Language. Portuguese (Brazilian laavor) ass now eeen addd.. The Swedish language has also been updated.
- Family Group Sheet Reports. Page numbering problem, with sources included, has been fixed.
- Boxed Pedigree Chart Cascading charts would often not show the husband of a wife when printed as person #1. This is now fixed.
- Story Reports. Page numbering problem, when option for "New Page each person" was selected, has been fixed. Also fixed a bug that would sometimes continue a person when they shouldn't have been continued.
- Database Structure Report. Ancestor Count had a bug that has been fixed. Page numbering also fixed.
- Photo Album NEW Option. Allows printing of photos to continue on same line - using less paper. Also paging problem was worked on.
- Page Length Adjustment has been added to the Page Setup Window (File Menu or Print Reports Window). Most users will leave this at the "Normal" setting. For those with "faulty" printer drivers that sometimes cause single lines to print on the even pages, you might try adjusting this - probably negative one at a time to see if the paging problem can be eliminated. (No guarantees here.)
- Relationship calculator used to only work properly up to 50 generations. It will now work up to 150 generations.
- Tree (from Main Window) would cause the wrong FRN to be displayed after accessing it from a marriage after the first. Minor bug fixed. Most people would never notice this one.
- Merge Databases source notes for individuals would not merge correctly. This has now been fixed.
- Backup OCX Error (on Win95 Version) can be eliminated by installing these two DLLs (MFC40.DLL & MSVCRT40.DLL), either into the c:\windows\system directory or into the CFT-Win directory (normally c:\cftw). You can download these files from Cumberland Family Software's Web Site (SYSDLL2.ZIP). Check the Freeware area.
Ira has released Version 2.21 of CFT for Windows. Below is a list showing the new features of v2.21 and improvements of the previous version.
Version 2.21 Improvements:
- Fixed "Fix Relationship" Popup Menu which was corrupt in v2.20.
- Corrected Large Button Help Tips to show tips in languages other
than English.
- Fixed Main Window showing Christening date as a substitute for
Birth and Burial as a substitute for Death.
- Dutch Surname Sort Order changed to be called "European Surname
Sort Order" with samples in Help of Dutch, French, German,
Italian and Spanish names.
- Italian Language Added.
Also updates to Dutch month (lower case month names).
- Global Search Report - spacing bewteen lines reduced and page
length extended.
- Rebuild - fixed bug which wiped out "bef", "aft", "abt" in main
window dates. fixed bug which inadvertantly wrote foreign language
months to date fields when using a language other than English.
Also corrected a bug in the "Correct Living Flag" which would
sometimes not correct living flag properly.
- Reports - fixed a bug which occaisionally caused "AD" without any
other date to appear in the on-screen tree and some reports, such
as Ahnentafel and Descendant List Report.
- Event Editor - fixed bug which would not update "story" after date
was entered.
- GEDCOM Import - now ignores the SURN and GIVN tags which are
now commin in Family Origin GEDCOM files. There extraneous tags
are used in addition to the full (more important) NAME tag.
Information in the SURN and GIVN tags are extraneous and unnecessary.
- TimeLine Reports - fixed a bug which would show a vertical bar in
early AD years (before 600 AD for example). Also fixed to allow
showing of BC dates.
- Database Verification - fixed a bug which gave out-of-order errors
for BC dates.
We recommend that you visit Ira's web site and download a shareware copy of CFTW or UPGRADE your current registered version. Here you can also place an order, for a registered version of CFTW, or any of Ira's other fantastic programs.
Click to see what CFT looks like in Windows.
Click to see a table of CFT's 30 different types of charts and reports.
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