Modern Software Experience

2015-12-14

Family Tree Maker Logo

Don't Panic

discontinued

On 2015 December 8, Ancestry.com announced that they are discontinuing New Family Tree Maker. This announcement resulted in a flood of comments, numbering in the thousands within hours. The follow-up post of 2015 December 9 claims to offer some clarifications, but actually just mostly repeats the same things in different words. It merely adds a noncommittal statement regarding third-party integration with Ancestry.com (Member Trees, through the TreeSync API) and a remark that they aren't selling Family Tree Maker.

The Family Tree Maker software will continue to function and dysfunction as you're used to for at least another year.

The salient facts stated in both blog posts are:

To that, the second blog posts adds:

Missing from both blog posts are clear statements that

advance notice

Ancestry.com's announcement may be very disappointing, but is no reason for panic. The Family Tree Maker software will continue to function and dysfunction as you're used to for at least another year. In fact, Ancestry will continue to provide updates to address major defects and compatibility issues for at least another year. The Ancestry.com announcement is an advance notice that gives you plenty of time to consider your options.

If you truly depend on Family Tree Maker and opted for the cheaper download-and-install only option, consider buying the disks.

sale

Although Ancestry.com is discontinuing New Family Tree Maker, they have not lowered the price. There is no fire sale. Family Tree Maker remains a remarkably expensive product.

If you really depend on Family Tree Maker, you may want to buy it again; If you truly depend on Family Tree Maker and opted for the cheaper download-and-install only option, consider buying the disks.
Although Ancestry.com stop selling Family Tree Maker at the end of the year, you need not make a hasty decision. Family Tree Maker is available as a boxed product from online vendors such as Amazon.com and American brick-and-mortar stores, and they will continue to sell the existing supply. In fact, they are likely to start selling it at a discount.

In practice, all the New Family Tree Maker support line was good for was venting and demanding your money back.

support

Ancestry.com will terminate all support of New Family Tree Maker on or after 2017 Jan 1. That may sound like an important cut-off date, but the truth is that Ancestry.com's support of Family Tree Maker never amounted to much anyway.
There are many public complaints from Family Tree Maker users that Ancestry.com's ostensible tech support is frustratingly clueless and unable to solve the problems they have, that they are not just unhelpful but practically incapable of anything but condescendingly repeating the same fixes that don't work.
To be fair, that isn't the support desk's fault; they depend on information from product development, and they never received much. In practice, all the New Family Tree Maker support line was good for was venting and demanding your money back.

The real reason Ancestry.com is discontinuing New Family Tree Maker, in plain English, is that it is a hopelessly buggy, painfully slow, memory-hungry and rather crash-prone program, one that even messes up your data, and they've finally given up trying to fix it.

TreeSync

A major reason to continue to use New Family Tree Maker, despite its many shortcomings, is TreeSync; the ability to synchronise your desktop database (FTM) with your web database (Ancestry Member Trees), which in turn synchronises with the mobile app. It sure seems an odd decision on Ancestry.com's part to deliberately destroy such wonderful functionality.

The real reason Ancestry.com is discontinuing New Family Tree Maker, in plain English, is that it is a hopelessly buggy, painfully slow, memory-hungry and rather crash-prone program, one that even messes up your data, and they've finally given up trying to fix it.
Most FTM users do have small (less than say 10.000 individuals) or even tiny trees (less than say 2.000 individuals), and are less likely to experience problems than those with large trees, but those problems are very real. Ancestry.com support has to deal with frustrated users whose database has been messed up beyond repair way too often. The New Family Tree Maker product is hurting their users and their reputation; after repeated valiant efforts to fix things failed, Ancestry.com has no other choice than to put the product to pasture. Ancestry.com is not happy about that decision, but it is a much better decision than continuing to peddle seriously defective software.

Read the announcement carefully; Ancestry.com is terminating the Family Tree Maker product, Ancestry.com is not terminating the TreeSync functionality. Family Tree Maker's TreeSync feature works through the proprietary TreeSync API. That TreeSync API is feature of the web site, not the desktop software, and it is not going away any time soon. Ancestry.com's mobile apps need it.

The demise of Family Tree Maker may very well be the best news that TreeSync enthusiasts ever heard.

good news?

Most of the problems users experience with TreeSync are likely rooted in Family Tree Maker defects. After all, although many users complain about FTM's TreeSync problems, the very popular mobile apps synchronise just fine.
The demise of Family Tree Maker may very well be the best news that FTM TreeSync enthusiasts ever heard. Now that Ancestry.com is no longer trying to position TreeSync as a feature unique to Family Tree Maker, and in fact no longer trying to sell any desktop genealogy software at all, Ancestry.com is likely to open up the TreeSync API to third-party vendors.
Moreover, FTM TreeSync will continue to function and dysfunction for at least another year, so if Ancestry.com hurries opening up the TreeSync API a bit, you may be able to switch to some third-party product that includes TreeSync functionality before FTM TreeSync stops working, and I would not be surprised if some third-party desktop software will do a better job of synchronising with Ancestry.com Member Trees than New Family Tree Maker ever did.

open source?

Among the thousands of comments on Ancestry.com blog announcement are few who suggest that Ancestry.com make Family Tree Maker as open source. Ancestry.com's statement in the second blog post, that they have no plans to sell it, while completely ignoring the open source suggestion, suggests how likely they are to consider that.

The idea behind the call for open-sourcing the code is to give the product a second life, but Ancestry.com does not want it to have a second life. Ancestry.com is already embarrassed by the Family Tree Maker product, and they aren't eager to suffer more embarrassment. We know the Family Tree Maker code is sloppy, open-sourcing it would reveal just how sloppy.
Moreover, merely open-sourcing the code would not be enough to recreate the product. Family Tree Maker relies on quite a few third-party components (the article Family Tree Maker 2009 Technology provides an overview). and at least one of these third-party components - to wit Wholly Genes GenBridge - is not even available for licensing anymore.

switch

If you like, you can continue to use Family Tree Maker long after TreeSync stops working. Heck, FamilySearch discontinued PAF development more than a dozen years ago, and it's still popular. However, sooner or later, you'll probably want to switch to another, better supported product.

competitive upgrade offers

RootsMagic is offering an upgrade to RootsMagic. Millennia is offering an upgrade to Legacy Family Tree to Family Tree Maker users. Incline Software is offering a competitive upgrade to Ancestral Quest.
Something a Family Tree Maker user may not expect is that all these vendors offer a free lite edition of their product. The lite edition can be used indefinitely, so you can evaluate the product at your leisure. These free editions are limited in functionality, but do offer all the basics, and many users are happy using these free editions.

Calico Pie is offering a discount on Family Historian. Calico Pie does not offer a free edition of Family Historian, but does offer a free 30-day trial.

The above-mentioned genealogy programs are for Windows. Ancestry.com is discontinuing New Family Tree Maker for Mac too, and Synium is offering a discount on MacFamilyTree and MobileFamilyTree.

There are many more desktop genealogy products out there, such as Ahnenblatt, Heredis and Daub Ages. Check Louis Kessler's GenSoftReviews site to see just how many genealogy programs there are, and read user comments.

MyHeritage offer

MyHeritage also has an interesting special offer for Family Tree Maker. If you do not merely import your data into MyHeritage Family Tree Builder, but then sync it with their website, they will wave the regular limt of 250 individuals on a free account, and provide unlimited capacity instead, if you bother to email them at .
This is a deal you may want to take advantage of even if you prefer one of the other offers. You'll have to give them a copy of your database, but if you were syncing your data with Ancestry.com already, you probably don't object to that.

You can get full editions of both RootsMagic and Legacy for less than the cost of a single New Family Tree Maker license.

RootsMagic versus Legacy

RootsMagic and Millennia are merely two of the best known products, and the ones who were quick to respond to Ancestry.com's announcement.
Of those two product, I strongly recommend RootsMagic over Legacy, and not just because I consider it a much better product overall. There are two reasons that apply specifically to current Family Tree Maker users. First of all, like New Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic is a modern, Unicode-based program, while Legacy Family Tree is a dated code-page based program with very limited character set support, and would therefore arguably a downgrade. Millennia certainly cannot guarantee that Legacy will import all your data, when it cannot even guarantee that Legacy will import all characters.
The second and related reason is that, because of its outdated technological foundation, Legacy is much more likely to follow TMG into obsolescence soon than RootsMagic is, at which point you would have to switch again...
But you know what? You can get full editions of both RootsMagic and Legacy for less than the cost of a single New Family Tree Maker license.

updates

2016-02-02: New Family Tree Maker disdiscontinued

Ancestry.com just announced that it sold New Family Tree Maker to Software Mackiev, see New Family Tree Maker disdiscontinued.

2016-02-02: RootsMagic TreeSync

Ancestry.com & RootsMagic announced that RootsMagic will feature syncing with Ancestry Member Trees. RootsMagic will also feature search of Ancestry.com record collections and direct import from New Family Tree Maker databases. See RootsMagic TreeSync.

2016-02-09: New Family Tree Maker Future

New Family Tree Maker Future is an interview with Software MacKiev president Jack Minsky about their long-term plans.

links

news

background

competitive upgrade offers

 

Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.