Genealogy Chat

I've just received an email advising that Ancestry are to stop selling FTM. They will continue to support features like Treesync until January 2017.

This is disastrous. Building my tree is highly dependant on the clues I can find which come from other people syncing their FTM trees with Ancestry online.

I do keep a duplicate tree on GR but the features and reports available with FTM are far superior and I receive very few Matches from GR.

I feel as if the years of effort I've put into my FTM tree since 1997 have been wasted and it will now become largely 'froxen'.

Hugh.

I have not received any such email

But then, I pay little attention to other peoples trees on ancestry except as a hint if I am completely lost as to what happened to an ancestor.

I just do not trust trees on there ........... far too many tree owners just copy from other trees willy-nilly without thinking whether the hints are accurate or not.

AND, the hints are not accurate in most cases!


Witness my great-aunt and her husband who were "adopted" by someone believing a hint ............ only his pair were born about 100 years before my gt aunt. It meant that his tree had people born in the 1880s as parents of children born around 1810-1830 :-D

I was lucky .............. I left a message on his tree, where anyone else could read it. Within 3 days he had removed my gt aunt and uncle from there. I do not know whether anyone else copied from his tree before I caught the mistake and he corrected it.

That's much better than the poor GR member who has for years been trying to get her sister returned to her ................. from all the trees that show the sister as mother of children born in the 18th century


My own family is one heck of a mess on most of the trees on ancestry, because they have all copied from each other ........... I have the certificates and Parish Register entries to prove that my version is the correct one. But too many of them will not believe it.

I concur with your point about many people copying data without careful consideration of the facts and 'sensibility checks'. However, there are other careful researchers out there who provide sensible valid data and I take great care to weed out the rubbish and to avoid contributors who supply it.

Ancestry have not indicated if they will permit another online provider to sync with FTM trees and continue to provide a service. I suspect not,

Hugh.

Just feel gutted. Like Hugh I feel my work has been wasted. I preferred the offline version.

Of course, the software itself 'should' continue to work (in its current version) but with no further upgrades. If you do hit a technical snag you will have no support.

There will be no more hints emailed to you or new data being added to the 'Green Leaf' searches as these depend on people syncing their trees online.

Finally, make sure you have a local backup as you cannot depend on a synced Ancestry tree to act as this.

Hugh.

I've just found my email.

I don't sync, just use FTM for my offline tree and have been very happy with it, maybe I will have to start looking at other programs for when my FTM gets too old for newer computer systems.

Maybe Ancestry don't like us keeping offline trees. Maybe they want us all to just keep trees on their own system for them to access for whatever purpose.....

Roots Magic have lost no time in emailing about how easy it is to transfer a FTM tree to Roots Magic.

I must say that I love the synch facility between Ancestry and FTM and will have to remember to ensure I update my offline tree when I find something new on Ancestry.

At least we have a year to prepare for the change.

A lot of unhappy customers on their own blog:
http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2015/12/08/ancestry-to-retire-family-tree-maker-software/?o_iid=9972&o_lid=9972&o_sch=

Yes, Roots Magic are quick off the mark-offering a discount to anyone ordering now !!!

If you have FTM from a disc it will "stand alone" but without the sync facility and any updates

Lot of panicing FTM users on Ancestrys blog :-(

Dick Eastman : http://blog.eogn.com/2015/12/08/ancestry-to-retire-family-tree-maker-software/
advocates moving to the Cloud, but before you do that read:

http://www.familytreeforum.com/showthread.php/113293-Genealogy-s-Star-Dropbox-shutdown-foreshadows-Cloud-storage-issues

We are still using FTM 2005, which works fine for us. I don't belong to Ancestry and am not sure what syncing is - although I can guess.

namelessone - we recently upgraded to Windows 10 and our FTM transferred with no problems, so unless yours is even older, you shouldn't have to worry about it. :-)

Hi Anysmum thanks but I was soothsaying and foretelling the future :-D

Just went into my FTM and found an "update" waiting !

ElizabethK, yes, I got this a few days ago - probably the last one ! This was issued before the shutdown announcement.

Hugh.

So in reading the email I received it said

"As we strive to provide our customers with the best experience possible, we are constantly evaluating our services and product offerings. True to this focus, we’ve taken a hard look at the declining desktop software market and the impact this has on being able to continue to provide new content, product enhancements and support that our users need. With that, we’ve made the tough decision to stop selling Family Tree Maker as of December 31, 2015."

My interpretation of the above paragrah is it's become an unviable option to produce a physical cd which you purchase from online or from a computer store. So I get it, but given so many programs are available to be downloaded only on the internet one would believe FTM would have to be more economical to be produced in a download format only.

Makes sense to me.

I think I'll pose the question to Ancestry and see what they have to say.

Gai :-S