If you insert a photo directly to a person's record, adding a date automatically prompts Family Historian to list their age at the time. A face-tagging feature means people in group shots can be automatically recognised and their names suggested. Mapping is also now supported by a separate plug-in.

Family Historian 5 goes to great lengths to ensure what you can enter is as accurate as possible, allowing entries for multiple marriages and sets of children from the same parents; divorce, cohabiting and same-sex relationships.

Other family tree software we've tried would not cater for some of these details or would assume a wife took the husband's name. An overview of a person's immediate family is provided in a focus window on the right of the screen where you can add more detail about each of them without changing the 'root' person and reordering the database.

When you've gathered enough detail and have photos, dates and brief biographies of a family branch, you can create a photo book of them by exporting the file as a booklet.

Alternatively, if you started your research in another genealogy program, you can import a GEDCOM file -- GEnealogical Data COMmunication, a popular plain-text format for family databases -- that you created, and merge it with the research you add to your Family Historian 5 database.