Ancestral Quest 12 was introduced on 2007 May 10. It adds some nice new features to an already feature-rich program.
Their website offers both a flyer that highlights the new features and
video that explains them.
Some major new features are the ability to create a family book containing selected
reports as reserved space for pages created outside Ancestral Quest, the Dropline Descendants Chart, extensive customisation capabilities for sentences,
support for several new fields include DNA data, and you can keep individuals
and relationships from appearing in GEDCOM files or on reports by marking them
confidential, to document family secrets yet keep them secret.
Ancestral Quest now allows translation into any language - but does not come with any other locale than Amglish yet. AQ 12 now allows not just reading for but also of PAF 5 databases, and allows you to compare and selectively merge AQ, PAF and GEDCOM databases.
The most noteworthy minor improvement is probably that the research log can now be sorted by repository. Another interesting one is that AQ can now auto-merge based on GUID.
After suggesting a directory and allowing you to change it, the Ancestral Quest install Wizard offers a choice between a Custom, Minimal and Typical setup. I selected Custom and did not change a thing. The install includes the PDF-XChange printer driver. Apparently, Ancestral Quest does not really support PDF, but - like any other program - can be made to support by installing a print driver that writes PDF files. At the end of the install, the Install Wizard claims that I need to restart Windows. That demand is bogus. It is also a serious mistake for a mere desktop database application to demand a system restart.
The default settings of Custom setup includes the Collaboration Support Files. Once you’re done installing Ancestral Quest itself, the Ancestral Quest Collaboration Support Setup Maintenance program starts up. It is a bit strange that this feature of Ancestral Quest is not an option in the Ancestral Quest setup, but a separate install program. After all, you can only opt for this feature when you install Ancestral Quest on your machine. Weirdly, the install of PDF-XChange, a independent third-party product by Docu-Track, does not use a separate installation program. It feels as if these two add-on switched places.
The install procedure creates a desktop icon. The first time you start
Ancestral Quest (AQ) it complains database not found
- as if not having an
Ancestral Quest database yet is some kind of error. It displays that error
even before it displays its splash screen.
After the splash screen, which disappear automatically, you get a Welcome to
Ancestral Quest
dialog box, that offer to start a new database, open an
existing one, search for one or collaborate with other researchers.
I started by creating a new database. Once I had done that, I got a tip. Ancestral Quest offers tip on start-up, and the tip dialog itself offers the ability to turn this feature off. The tip dialog was followed by the Check of Updates dialog box. Unlike many other programs, Ancestral Quest gets this right. It does not just start connecting to the Internet, but first informs you that it is about to do so and why, and only connects when you give your okay. You can choose to Check Now, Wait a few days or tell AQ to never show that message again. That last option is ideal if you dislike all kinds of boxes popping up on start-up. It does not imply that you won’t get any updates ever, as you can always check for an update by choosing Internet| Check for latest AQ release.
The Internet menu item includes an item with the tantalising title Web’s
Best Genealogy Resources
. It brings up a page on the Ancestral Quest web site,
to show a list of links to other sites (including commercial ones) that has
obviously not been updated in ages. It does not include Ellis Island and still
links to gendex, although Gene Stark closed it down back in 2004.
The GEDCOM import box has several options, and I decided to go with all the defaults. Importing an GEDCOM with 100.067 persons and 45.613 marriages took 52 minutes and 25 seconds, i.e. 3145 seconds. That is just 31,82 individuals per seconds, and that is not very good performance.
That includes a pause of several seconds because someone at Incline Software thought it was a good idea to pause the import as soon as it detects a single all-caps name to ask whether I want to convert these. Really now, if you want to offer that option, offer it on the dialog you start the import with. Pausing the import to ask questions is a user interface mistake, yet AQ actually asks a second question near the end of the import.
After about a quarter of hour it seemed to be done importing, but popped up a dialog noting that I have many citations, and asked whether I am sure that I want to merge any duplicates, as this could take a long time. That question could have been asked before it started the import as well. From this messagebox until the completion of the import, AQ did no longer show a progress dialog box, and the Windows Task Manager showed AQ as being unresponsive. AQ should really show a progress bar, as this part of the import process took more time than the actual port.
I caught the second messagebox immediately, but the pauses caused by both are included in the total import time, as they do delay the completion of the import.
Ancestral Quest produces an import listing for the GEDCOM import, and shows it once the import is done. Unsurprising, Ancestral Quest had little problem import a PAF GEDCOM, and only issued warnings for individuals it could not determine the gender for. All warnings listed the line number they applied to, but not the line itself.
Remarkably, the import log does start with basic GEDCOM stats, but does not end with the import time or performance statistics. Apparently, Incline is quite aware that their GEDCOM import speed is not exactly stellar.
Ancestral Quest supports all the right export formats and none of the wrong
ones. Ancestral Quest will not let you make the mistake of exporting to MS-DOS
or Windows ANSI, but supports UTF-8 and ANSEL. AQ even supports UTF-16 (labelled
UNICODE
because that is what the GEDCOM 5.5 specification calls it).
Surprisingly, Incline Software does not dare to allow you to examine the actual quality of their GEDCOM export until you buy, not even for small files. What good is a trial version if you cannot evaluate the most important feature? No genealogy software is worth anything if you cannot get your data out in a format that allows import into other programs.
The demo version of AQ will export to a PAF file using the Database Converter, and PAF can make GEDCOMs for you. The existence of that roundabout export method, which Incline Software can hardly be unaware of, makes the demo restriction even harder to understand, but is otherwise beside the point. You should be able to evaluate the quality of the GEDCOM output before buying a genealogy program. That a vendor does not dare allow you to look at their GEDCOM output before you hand them your cash is not a good sign.
The GEDCOM I imported includes a submitter, yet when I look in AQ, that data
is not show in Prepared By
. It seems AQ silently failed to import that, an
export to GEDCOM might confirm that mistake.
Personal Ancestral File (PAF) and Ancestral Quest (AQ) share a common heritage. PAF 4 is based on Ancestral Quest 3. Although the products diverged, similarities are still noticeable.
As PAF has not been updated in years, and I am bothered by some of its limitations, I have been looking around to replace it. I have looked at version 11 before, and as I look at version 12, it is once again the garish bright yellow background of the main window that makes me do a double-take. Luckily, the colour can be set to something more reasonable in the General Preferences, and I set it to a boring but more reasonable light grey.
Ancestral Quest version 11 can be used as viewer for PAF databases; it could read PAF files, but not write them. To modify a PAF database using AQ 11, it had to be converted to AQ format first, but Ancestral Quest 12 allows direct editing of PAF databases. This makes AQ 12 an even more interesting proposition for PAF users looking to change to a program that is actually being maintained with updates.
When you run PAF and AQ side by side, the family resemblance is obvious, and it is not hard for a PAF user to feel at home. PAF’s family view looks cleaner, AQ has extra buttons on it. Those buttons are handy shortcuts for often used menu items. But even without these buttons, I’d prefer the PAF layout; it shows the birth and death information for the parents, whereas AQ view shows their names only. There is an extra box in the top left corner which will display data for the selected person, but it gives a cluttered feel. Besides, data for parents should be where the parents are and data for children should be where the children are.
The pedigree view of PAF and AQ are virtually the same. One minor thing cluttering up the family view really stands out here; AQ shows the Record ID for person after their name. AQ allows turning it off , and once you do, there is no significant difference between the PAF and AQ pedigree view anymore. I prefer to keep my view clean, but it is a worthy feature, as you can also opt to display either identifiers you yourself assigned or Ancestral File Numbers (AFNs).
The name list is practically the same, even the dialog box to change what columns it displays looks familiar.
The one thing I really dislike about AQ is the way it shows all citations above each other so that it looks like one big text. That part of the AQ interface feels really awkward, because It is almost impossible to tell where one citations ends and another begins. Even worse, it merges the several fields, at least the author, the source title, the source text and the citation comment into one big mess with no way to tell them apart. All these fields are carelessly strung together and than immediately followed by the next equally messed up citation. Source citations are important, so I want to see what’s what, and I find AQ interface not just unfriendly and ugly, but unworkable.
One thing that takes getting used to is that double-clicking an individual in the pedigree view makes it the primary individual, where in PAF a double-click brings up the edit box. An option lets you change AQ to behave like PAF, but AQ’s default action does make sense.
Ancestral Quest 12 adds an individual view, a tab that shows all information for a single individual. Neither PAF nor AQ11 offers such an overview. I don’t care much for the way it looks, but it is certainly nice that there is page that shows it all.
Of the new features, the one that really intrigued me is the ability to compare your AQ file with another AQ file, a PAF file or a GEDCOM and selective merge changes. For starters, I decided to try its comparison and speed by comparing the 100K GEDCOM I had imported to the PAF original, but the trial will only let you try this with extremely small databases (40 individuals or less), which makes it impossible to judge its performance on realistically sized databases.
Looking through the menus, there was one feature I missed; a master place
list. Ancestral Quest will actually expand abbreviations for American and
Canadian states
(provinces), but there is no master place list. That’s a
pity. I’ve found, using programs that do support place lists, that you will spot
typos by just looking through the list.
Ancestral Quest 12 is Unicode-based. That is a good thing, but I am bit surprised by this claim. I seem to recall that AQ 11 already supported Unicode. In fact, I’ve looked at PAF databases, and concluded that PAF databases uses UTF-8 internally - so any version of AQ that reads PAF databases is already supporting Unicode.
I reinstalled AQ11 to double-check, and happened to notice that AQ 11 allowed 120 instead of merely 40 individuals in test files. Both numbers seem rather random, but I wonder why Incline decided to reduce the number so drastically. Anyway, a quick test seems to confirm that PAF 5, AQ 11 and AQ 12 al use UTF-8 internally. I’d hazard a guess that all versions of Ancestral Quest since version 3 (released 1999) use UTF-8 internally. So what’s so new about AQ 12’s Unicode support?
Although PAF has been offering UTF-8 export since version 5 (2001), AQ 11
does not offer it. AQ 11 only offers ANSEL and the deprecated ANSI
as GEDCOM
5.5 export options. AQ 12 is the first version of AQ to actually offer UTF-8
export and no longer offers ANSI
.
In AQ 12, Incline is finally using Unicode for all the text strings it uses, and that change enables AQ 12 to offer translation of these strings to any language. Alas, Incline is not offering anything but the Amglish locale, and they counting on grass-roots efforts for translation to other languages.
Ancestral Quest has many features. One feature I have often been pining for, especially when I moved down a wrong branch and then had to search for a person again are the browser-like forward and backward buttons, complete with drop-down selection. I am currently not aware of any other genealogy program offering this, but I think all should have this.
Another option that helps you navigate the tree is Show Relationships. As you
navigate through the database, AQ will show the relationship of person to the
root person on the family screen. This is not perfect - it will show a
half-brother as merely Brother
, but it will tell you what relationship someone
else has to you, and that happens to be one of the questions my distant family
members ask most often. In PAF, you need to start the Relationship Calculator
(called Relationship Examiner in AQ) to find out, in AQ, you just look at the
screen.
One thing owners of big database will appreciate is that AQ has extensive search possibilities. The search interface has grown into multiple dialog boxes, and seems in dire need of an overhaul to me, but there is nothing wrong with the search capabilities. You can search by id or by name, for individuals or marriages, on notes, sources or the scrapbook, and you can define your own filters.
One thing PAF lacks, while more and more programs are offering it, is a To-Do List. Ancestral Quest does offer this feature, and calls it the Research Manager. You can link to-do items to persons, and sort them in various ways.
One interesting feature for those with an Ancestry.com subscription, is that AQ will show Ancestry.com links for each person. This is far from reliable. AQ claims to find two trees that my grandfather and three trees my grandmother occurred in. According to AQ, my grandfather even occurs in more than two hundred (!) Ancestry.com records. That is nonsense. Ancestry.com has no information on my grandparents at all. The numbers AQ shows are not reliable.
The reporting capabilities of AQ are very similar to those of PAF. Roughly speaking, AQ offers the same reports, just with a bit more features and options. One major difference is that AQ support output to PDF and WordPerfect. AQ does not support output to Word. Word users must make do with the RTF output.
The option to create web pages is not on the reports dialog, but on the Internet menu. It is also a feature that the demo version does not allow you to evaluate. There is no telling how fast or slow AQ12’s web site generation is, how usable its indexes for large files are, or what the quality of the resulting HTML is. However, if you search the web, you may notice that that web sites created with AQ11 do not validate.
The installation procedure works, but is in need of some attention. AQ stands out for getting the update procedure right, by telling the user what it is about to do and keeping the user in control of the update process.
The GEDCOM import is on the slow side. The import does not respect the user either, but expects you keep watching their progress dialog because AQ may pop-up additional dialogs during the import. So forget about starting the import, to go and do something else, and come back for the results. The quality of the import listing is acceptable.
The GEDCOM export supports the right formats. AQ12 finally offers the ability
to export to UTF-8, and is one of the few programs to offer export to UTF-16.
Alas, Incline software does not dare to let you examine what the GEDCOM that AQ
generates look like until you register. In other words, you must buy this
software for the privilege of evaluating it. I always
thought the whole idea of a trial version was that you could evaluate the
product before buying it. In fact, I still think that. I dare Incline Software;
Show me the GEDCOM!
Meanwhile, I advise against buying any genealogy software until you had a chance
to examine its GEDCOM output for your own data.
A few changes to the default option settings make Ancestral Quest even more similar to PAF than it already is out of the box. Generally, AQ is the better program, but PAF definitely has the cleaner interface. AQ’s interface is a bit cluttered, and it user interface for source citations is simply unworkably bad.
Incline will not let you judge the performance of its compare and merge on a realistically sized database, and AQ does not offer a place list. AQ does feature a Research Manager. The Ancestry.com links feature is a nice idea, but not even the numbers are reliable. It does not so much help you find information, as send you on wild goose chases, thus spoiling your valuable time.
The UTF-8 GEDCOM code support makes AQ12 a nearly mandatory upgrade for AQ11 users exporting data to third-party programs. AQ12’s whole user interface feels a dated, but the source citation interface is particularly bad and stops me from recommending it to PAF 5.5 users.
Ancestral Quest 12 will tell you whether there is an update, but not install it for you. You need to close AQ, download the update and install it yourself.
The grass-roots effort Incline software is counting on is not materialising yet. More than a year after the release of Ancestral Quest 12, there still seem to be no additional languages available, not even an English file. The only available file is the Amglish file included with Ancestral Quest.
I should have noted this over a year ago already: with the release of Ancestral Quest version 12.1 on 2008 Nov 12, Incline Software abandoned the limited functionality trial edition and replaced it with a fully-functional 60-day trial.
| property | value |
|---|---|
| product | Ancestral Quest |
| version | 12 |
| organisation | Incline Software |
| website | Ancestral Quest |
| price | |
| requirement | Win32 |
| note | |
| Verdict | Some good, some bad |
| Rating | So-so |
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.