Ancestry has released the surprising announcement today that they are discontinuing their popular Family Tree Maker software.
…we’ve taken a hard look at the declining desktop software market and the impact this has on being able to continue to provide product enhancements and support that our users need. With that, we’ve made the decision to stop selling Family Tree Maker as of December 31, 2015.
According to the blog post, they will continue to offer support to current customers until Jan 2017.
One of the major selling points for the software in past years has been the availability of Ancestry TreeSync ™, a service that allows users to sync their online Ancestry tree with Family Tree Maker, which is a much more robust program than its online counterpart.
The TreeSync™ feature also allowed for the only easy way to download and back up many Ancestry record sources at one time — something we discussed in the recent article Stop ‘Saving’ Records to Your Ancestry Tree Until You Read This.
Because the online Ancestry tree does not allow access to paid sources added to an individual once a subscription ends, we are left wondering how this change will influence family historians who have counted on Family Tree Maker for continued access to their records.
Many customers are, not surprisingly, quite upset with this announcement. You can read the blog post and all of the feedback here.
Image: Ancestry.com headquarters in Provo, Utah
RS
I don not see why people are so worried the company that designed the software are taking it over and continuing the program so I cannot see a problem. Also as they are independent hopefully they will improve it by adding links to other genealogy sites such as Family search and others.
I will personally wait and see what happens and at worse all it will mean is no more upgrades and software will continue to work. Windows done same thing but XP still works.
i cannot believe Ancestry are contemplating this move ,it is totally unacceptable for a company to do this ,i shall have to print out all my existing software entries. This a typical move by an American company to hold us to Hostage when they do not get their way by not uploading our precious Family trees to them
Really a sad announcement and just shows you what happens when Companies are allowed to buy up all the competition can do. I’ve used the program from their start and have thousands of entries. I have refused to sync as I don’t trust the security of most of the big companies. Maybe that’s why they are dumping it as people are not syncing. It feels like they are “mooning” us and laughing about it. I too hope people dump any program associated with the Corp and hope it put’s them out of business. Hope we can find some enterprising young computer designers out there that can come with a similar program that we can do the switch. I also wish there was someway all of us could “MOON” Ancestry at the same time and say bye, bye.
I am teaching a FTM class In Oklahoma City and have started putting together a handout for transferring data and media from FTM to Legacy and Roots Magic. I will probably have it in final form in about a week. It will be posted at my website. I prefer RM over Legacy at this point (see my website) but it is very hard to get the media from FTM to go into Roots Magic and have all of the files in RM link to the Media. I was able to do it, and I have some point by point instructions coming out with the handout.. The website is “FTMBYEBYE.wordpress.com”. Dont know if this site can post website info or not.
I’ve been thinking I need to write up what I’ve learned so far, and Ancestry pulling the plug on Family TreeMaker has convinced me I only have until Jan of 2017 to get that done. I’m not sure I will continue building trees after that. I’ll not trust my family tree to the online Ancestry software. I believe they have an agenda that has little to do with helping private family research. I think they would like everything to be public, and used for their narrow Mormon religious purposes. That’s not my agenda, however.
I am very unhappy researcher!