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
I totally agree