Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

[donworth]

The market of genealogy programs for the Mac just got smaller. This seems to be an opportunity for Leister! There are a lot of FTM users asking what they should buy...

----- Email from Ancestry today ----------

Dear Family Tree Maker™ community,

Ancestry is proud to have made a significant investment this year to bring valuable new content and records to the Ancestry site. In 2015, we’ve made 220 million searchable historical records from Mexico available, more than 170 million pages from the largest collection of U.S. will and probate records, among others. We’ve also introduced new features such as Ancestry Academy, and major advancements for AncestryDNA.

As we strive to provide our customers with the best experience possible, we are constantly evaluating our services and product offerings. True to this focus, we’ve taken a hard look at the declining desktop software market and the impact this has on being able to continue to provide new content, product enhancements and support that our users need. With that, we’ve made the tough decision to stop selling Family Tree Maker as of December 31, 2015.

We will continue to support existing Family Tree Maker owners at least through January 1, 2017. During this time, all features of the software, including TreeSync™ will continue to work. Our Member Services team will also remain available to assist with questions or issues you may have.

These changes are never easy. But by focusing our efforts, we can concentrate on continuing to build great products for our loyal Ancestry community.

You can find additional details about the retirement of Family Tree Maker on our blog.

[John Meara]

Re: Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

My thoughts exactly Don. A brilliant market opportunity to bring across a huge number of disenfranchised FTM users! I've posted elsewhere about needing improved compatibility with Ancestry (via Gedcom) but what about syncing?

[donworth]

Re: Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

RootsMagic is already pitching that FTM users "have a home with us" and offering their product to FTM users for $20.

On syncing, I wonder how hard it would be to write a screen-scraper for Ancestry to get everything and put it into Reunion. It's just a lot of JSON parsing. We do it all the time at DNAgedcom to get Ancestry DNA match lists and trees. I don't think Ancestry could do anything about it since it would be the subscriber running the program to harvest his own pages.

[Alasdair Mackie]

Re: Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

Wow! Does this mean Ancestry are assuming people will entrust 'the cloud' with all their research? Everything stored in Ancestry on their servers?

Eeeek!

I am paranoid about my data being on one computer alone - so back up everywhere, keep some paper records etc...etc... I certainly wouldn't trust everything to the cloud!

[donworth]

Re: Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

Well, you don't just have a copy in the cloud, you keep a copy for yourself too. The cloud model is basically the same as the old mainframe with terminals model. Things are just circling back to the way they were in the 70s when I started out in computers! LOL

[ttl]

Re: Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

I'm someone who's most comfortable with data 100% in my own control, but it can be easily argued that data might very well be safer in the cloud because a paid professional service can usually be counted on to have serviceable backups; whereas we individual amateurs might possibly let that vital activity slide on occasion.

[Dona Ritchie]

Re: Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

The market of genealogy programs for the Mac just got smaller. This seems to be an opportunity for Leister! There are a lot of FTM users asking what they should buy...

Absolutely, people are beside themselves with worry and doubt, and hopping to change over to a new piece of software. A GREAT opportunity to quickly gather up new customers! Those of us who really love Reunion have been talking it up, but if you want to compete with RootsMagic and Legacy on the Mac front, you've got to do it now!

[donworth]

Re: Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

Unfortunately, it's hard to compete with $20 for RootsMagic when Reunion is up around $100. I happen to think it's far more functional, flexible and polished - but many people don't care about all that. Especially when they're coming from a $40 program (FTM). They don't want best in class - they just want something that will reliably do the basics.

http://genealogy-software-review.toptenreviews.com/mac-genealogy-software/

[Alasdair Mackie]

Re: Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

Well, you don't just have a copy in the cloud, you keep a copy for yourself too.

Ah, but will people who used to use FTM and have now (presumably) put it onto the Ancestry website continue with the local copy? I can imagine many only using the online version and update that, with no local copy (since the FTM local client is being withdrawn from support). That's my concern - primary data = local, secondary/backup = cloud.

[Bob White]

Re: Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

Folks.... Ancestry said they will stop selling at the end of this month and stop supporting one year from then.

That does not equal the software will all of a sudden quit working. I'm willing to bet it will work in standalone mode until some future OS update renders it into legacy status.

The only question this leaves in my mind is: When will the synch ability, for a family file between Ancestry.com and the local FTM file on your Mac, be terminated? My guess would be Dec 31, 2016.

Since I only use FTM as convenient document storage, that means I need to slowly move documents into Finder folders while renaming them to fit the scheme that I have used for Reunion for many years.

[Secan Researcher]

Re: Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

I'm one of the FTM soon-to-be-orphans looking for a new home. As has been noted, Reunion has a problem with people coming from FTM in its high price, particularly in this day of a $30 app being considered outrageously expensive. I'd like to try out the demo version of Reunion, but it won't allow import from GEDCOM files, even just a small number of people (Heredis, in comparison, allows import of up to 50 people in demo mode). I don't want to hand-enter a bunch of people just to see if I like the program, and I'm not willing to put out $100 for software I can't demo first.

Reunion has an advantage over many other genealogy codes for Mac users in that it's more of a native Mac app (or so I'm told). A drop in price and a friendlier demo version could help them catch many of the ex-FTM Mac people.

[Frank]

Re: Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

Contact us if you'd like a limited-time license to evaluate a GEDCOM import (with no limit to the number of people you can import).

help@LeisterPro.com

[William McKinney]

Re: Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

RootsMagic is already pitching that FTM users "have a home with us" and offering their product to FTM users for $20.

On syncing, I wonder how hard it would be to write a screen-scraper for Ancestry to get everything and put it into Reunion. It's just a lot of JSON parsing. We do it all the time at DNAgedcom to get Ancestry DNA match lists and trees. I don't think Ancestry could do anything about it since it would be the subscriber running the program to harvest his own pages.

Hi Don and everyone,

I AM one of those FTM users who is looking for a new home. I do NOT publish my tree on Ancestry, rather, I prefer to keep my information on my computer and use Ancestry as one of my research tools. I monitor both the FTM-Tech and FTM-Help forums and see that many folks are like me -- don't want to publish on Ancestry, but still be able to maintain my tree privately. For those folks that are Ancestry only, the FTM demise is not a hardship. I say this to reaffirm that a screen scraper will not be of any use to someone like me who has nothing on Ancestry, rather who is a former FTM customer looking for a new computer based program to manage and maintain my tree. Besides keeping my tree information private, I also appreciated the many reports available in FTM that are completely missing from Ancestry.

I just wanted to let you know that some of the FTMers are out looking actively and may be lurking quietly trying to learn about various products. I think that not only would Reunion be smart to create a web page for those looking for a new product but also provide a comparison that shows FTMers how Reunion compares to FTM. This would provide a more enticing view of Reunion. You are right that the $100 price tag will cause some real sticker shock for FTMers who are accustomed to a lower price, but Reunion could offer a conversion deal to get folks started with Reunion like RootsMagic is doing. Once using Reunion, the renewals will follow at a price that is more in line with FTM pricing. Just get them started and comfortable.

I just wanted to say "Hi" and that I am interested learning more about Reunion and what it has that FTM does not and what it cannot do that FTM does (or did!). If any Reunion users converted from FTM, it would be great to hear from them about their experience and how the products compare.

Thanks.

[donworth]

Re: Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

I have been using Reunion for 7 years and love it. I have been talking it up in the various FaceBook groups I'm in and to members of my local genealogical society. I have the sense that it is better than other programs - but other than FTM, I haven't used any of them. Now that RootsMagic has a Mac version, there are other Mac programs like Heraldis etc., and even Legacy likes to say you can run their software on a Mac using Parallels, it would be helpful if Leister would publish a list of features that are UNIQUE to Reunion (that all these other lower price-point programs typically don't have). Not something that slams the competition - something that explains why it's worth spending the extra money on Reunion. That would really help me when I'm trying to stick up for Reunion online.

[Secan Researcher]

Re: Family Tree Maker will be discontinued

Now that RootsMagic has a Mac version ...

Well, RootsMagic has a version you can run on a Mac, but I'd hardly call it a "Mac version" as yet. It's pretty much the Windows version configured to run inside a wine-based simulator. I found that out after I purchased it. They do say, however, that they are working on a more native Mac version. What they have now will be very familiar to anyone who has used Windows, and very foreign to those who have used only Macs.

There are also some issues importing FTM-output GEDCOM files, the main one being a mangling of path/file names for media files. There's a manual work-around, but it's clunky.