May 2018 July 2018 Ancestry . com was in the midst of an update or improvement. FTM limited sync when Ancestry was unstable, so for about 3 months no syncing. It was kind of a disaster. Not on FTM’s end, they were protecting data, but on Ancestry’s end, poor planning, not sure.

March 2018 FTM is still much improved. Occasionally the Sync Status Weather Report halts syncing. I do not complain, I appreciate this as Ancestry.com is glitchy and syncing in a certain moment of more glitchiness than usual wrecks trees.

In March 2017 maybe April MacKiev owns and operated Family Tree Maker. For me, using FTM on a Mac, this has been a huge improvement. I don’t want to jinx it but syncing has been relatively trouble free and things that never worked in the previous FTM now work, simple things like sorting and searching.

Every 3 months or so I unlink my synced tree, rename the FTM version then download my Ancestry tree as a new linked tree, always keeping the same (shared) copy on Ancestry. I have a smaller tree so easy to do. I think this cuts down on sync errors, it’s like a fresh copy.

Comments when Ancestry.com owned and operated Family Tree Maker:

All of my notes are for FTM3 for Mac, I believe the PC version is way better. Most of my negative issues are probably only related to syncing between FTM and Ancestry.com

• Formatting issues in syncing between Ancestry.com and FTM January 2017:

Jan 6 Formatting that doesn’t work on Ancestry.com and  FTM3 for Mac sync, on a MAC, cookies, cache, chrome, Firefox, add ons etc

& ” ‘ % @ ; : < $ > … and all the special characters: the L symbol for pound, the umlaut and any kind of URL hyperlink, shortened URL hyperlinks may be ok. Removing these symbols from citations and media seems to work better with syncing. So copying and pasting a transcription is wrong- formatting causes errors. Replacing special characters can help but not always. Sometimes paragraph formatting can’t be cleared, retyping is the easiest.

• GenSoft customer reviews and some publishing owner info.

I purchased this in May of 2015 via Ancestry.com, a download, Nova Development for Ancestry.com was the seller. In December of 2015 Ancestry.com announced- seemingly out of the blue- they were no longer making or supporting FTM, about 10,000 customers replied, unhappily, to the announcement. Soon it was announced that FTM would remain, now owned and managed by MacKiev. It was also announced that RootsMagic would soon be able to sync with Ancestry.com trees. In December of 2016 MacKiev has not officially released its updates and RootsMagic does not sync with Ancestry.com trees.

RootsMagic does import .ftmb files from FTM3 so its almost as good as syncing.  this ended by winter 2017 I believe.

FTM3 is not great but I guess its good. I’ve ended my $ Ancestry subscription for awhile and have been doing more in FTM. It is packed with possibilities: reports, relationships, lists, tools for tree clean up. One thing is definite- it is dated, I feel like I’m in Windows 95. I’m not a big software user but FTM, like Ancestry.com, is clunky and dated.

FTM also has formatting issues. And the FTM place database has issues.

FTM also has formatting issues.

And the FTM place database has issues.