Family Tree Maker started out as an MS-DOS application. For many years, the Windows variant was known as Family Tree Maker for Windows - and that explains the FTW abbreviation used for Family Tree Maker Classic. Like the original Family Tree Maker (for DOS), New Family Tree Maker is abbreviated to FTM again.
GEDCOM is the de facto standard for data exchange between different genealogy programs. It is not perfect, and each application has it own dialect, characterised by its additions, omissions, liberal interpretations and even direct violations of the GEDCOM specification. Serious yet common violations are the use of illegal character sets and vendor-specific tags that do not start with an underscores as they should.
Import of GEDCOM files into FTW import is hindered by FTW’s notoriously limited date format support and various fixed-size field restrictions, but the purported GEDCOM files it exports are quite possibly the worst in the industry.
The "GEDCOM" files that FTM Classic produces suffer from all the usual GEDCOM dialect issues. FTW adds many vendor-specific tags, supports the illegal "ANSI" character set, and further violates the specification with vendor-specific tags that do not start with underscores as they should.
Those few but big issues just mentioned already make that the "GEDCOM" files that FTW export are often so different from the GEDCOM specification that it is fair to say that many of these files do not qualify as GEDCOM at all.
The issues mentioned so far are not unique. Many other genealogy applications share the same issues, and produce purported GEDCOM files that are not really GEDCOM files either.
That export from one and import into another application works quite well despite many such issues is only partly because the GEDCOM specification allows applications to ignore unknown tags. Two other important reasons are that many applications support the same non-GEDCOM features, and that many vendors go out of their way to support import from market-leading competitors.
Many competing products and add-on tools support these illegal tags to ensure compatibility and avoid user complaints — and in doing so effectively validate FTW’s illegal tags as alternate forms of the official ones.
A problem unique to FTW is that it adds a full stops to
the BEF, AFT and BET tags.
Applications need not recognise the illegal BEF., AFT. and BET.
tags, and may reject them as invalid because they are invalid.
Many competing products and add-on tools support these illegal tags to ensure compatibility and avoid user complaints — and in doing so effectively validate FTW’s illegal tags as alternate forms of the official ones.
Another fairly unique problem is that many FTW versions produce purported GEDCOM files that are based on GEDCOM 5.3, a draft specification that includes features that never made into either an official GEDCOM specification or PAF. That mistake alone makes many FTW GEDCOM files different from other GEDCOM dialects.
There are more FTW GEDCOM issues. The links section includes links to several contemporary discussions of various FTW GEDCOM issues.
All the issues together could make trying to import a sizeable FTW GEDCOM into another application a challenging experience. The many differences with both true GEDCOM and the GEDCOM dialects of other products are effectively a failure to provide reasonable GEDCOM support.
Developers who have looked at FTW GEDCOM history tend to wonder whether that failure was deliberate. Various errors and deviations could be explained as honest mistakes and misunderstandings, but the apparent lack of eagerness to quickly provide corrective patches or at least make sure the issues are fixed in the next major version have diminished the plausible deniability somewhat.
Although FTW’s purported GEDCOM output certainly is not perfect, and a bit of a barrier in switching to another application, it is not a showstopper.
Not only do many vendors of competing products make sure they can import the files, there are also several third-party tools that fix various problems. The link section below provides links to old tools tools by Rick Parsons, Jane Taubman and Ken Morse and to Louis Kessler’s Behold. The Behold program features a very forgiving GEDCOM reader and when I mentioned a particular FTW 2 defect, Louis immediately added support for it.
Newer versions of FTM Classic can read the files written by previous versions, and even known about and compensate for mistakes older versions made.
There is also a long tradition of third-party products reading genealogy database formats directly, which started with the many add-on programs for Personal Ancestral File (PAF) version 2. Quite a few genealogy applications will read the data formats of popular products such as PAF, Family Tree Maker and Legacy Family Tree directly.
Ancestry.com’s own New Family Tree Maker reads FTW databases directly. Legacy Family Tree and RootsMagic are examples of competing products that can read FTW databases directly and write a better GEDCOM file.
What is still missing, what Ancestry.com should provide, is a free FTW to GEDCOM and FTW "GEDCOM" to GEDCOM conversion tool.
Ancestry.com should offer a free FTW and FTW GEDCOM to GEDCOM converter.
FTW GEDCOM is a problematic GEDCOM dialect. It is so different from both proper GEDCOM and common practice, that it arguably doesn’t even qualify as a GEDCOM dialect. Importing FTW GEDCOM into other applications can be problematic. There are various solutions, but Ancestry.com should offer a free FTW and FTW GEDCOM to GEDCOM converter.
A major and entirely FTW-specific issue is that FTW does not just produce an already problematic FTW GEDCOM dialect, but something else as well, that Ancestry.com tries to pass of GEDCOM, but is perhaps best described as an undocumented proprietary GEDCOM-like format, which I have called FTW TEXT.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.