‘Ultimate Guide to Mastering FamilySearch’ Earns Rave Reviews and Questions about Pricing

The first reviews of Dana Ann Palmer’s Ultimate Guide to Mastering FamilySearch are in, and they couldn’t be better. Linda Stufflebean writes the Empty Branches on the Family Tree blog, one of the most popular genealogy blogs on the Internet. She also monitors other postings and publishes a weekly listing of the most valuable articles on genealogy. She’s a regular user of FamilySearch.org, so we take great pride in one of her concluding comments in the December 13, 2025, review:

“Dana Palmer has written a fabulous Ultimate Guide to Mastering FamilySearch. It’s extremely well-organized—I glanced at the index, but found everything I was seeking in the Table of Contents—and easy to use color images that can actually be read. I’d recommend this book to anyone who uses or wants to learn how to navigate the FamilySearch website, maximizing chances of success.”

You can read Linda’s full review here: Ultimate Guide to Mastering FamilySearch by Dana Ann Palmer, CG, CGL: Book Review | Empty Branches on the Family Tree .

Marian Wood’s review was published on her blog, Climbing My Family Tree, on December 16. It begins this way, 

“Truly, this book is the ultimate guide to mastering FamilySearch.com. Even genealogy researchers who have been using the free FamilySearch site for a long time will find valuable tips and tricks in this brand new book.”

And the review concludes, “Really, I can’t say enough good things about this terrific new book.” You can read Marian’s full review at Climbing My Family Tree: December 2025

Now a few words from “Genealogy Pointers” about prices. The Ultimate Guide to Mastering FamilySearch is available as an eBook for $29.95, and in print for $59.95. Both editions are in full color. Anyone who prefers the electronic version or cannot afford to buy the print edition will find the identical content in the eBook for half the cost. Printing books in color is expensive, much more expensive than printing in black and white. Moreover, very few of our titles are printed in large enough quantities to significantly reduce the cost to manufacture them. In fact, even at $59.95 for the print edition, our profit margin is below our customary one.

 Despite the added expense, we decided to go with a color print edition because color illustrations (think screen shots) simply do not reproduce well when they are converted to black and white.  We received some criticism about this problem when pages from some earlier “website books” were hard to decipher, or when the descriptions of what were originally color illustrations on the web did not match up well with black and white depictions in the printed version.  In short, when faced with the choice of producing the Ultimate Guide only as an eBook, or producing an expensive paperback edition, we opted for the latter. We hope the public agrees with our decision.