Thinking about purchasing FTM

[Bob White]

Somewhere up above, cponelli invited Roger or me to chime in. What I can say is that I don't do the repetitive GEDCOM thing. I did wrestle with the idea several years ago when the synch ability feature was added to FTM. What works for me? On my large screen 27" iMac, I work Reunion and Ancestry side by side. I only use FTM as my library.

The key to my thinking? FTM puts a copy of all media from Ancestry on my copy of FTM upon doing a synch. Other than head shot photos, the huge majority of media are items like census sheets that one only needs to see occasionally. Thus, multimedia in my Reunion app is strictly people photos. All other media lives in FTM and is only a couple clicks away if needed.

[Susan Freas Rogers]

Does anyone know if FTM goes on sale on Black Friday or CyberMonday? (I don't expect anyone to know this unless that's when you actually bought it. )

This thread has caused me to consider getting FTM to keep my Ancestry tree updated, not because I really care about having a good tree online, but only because their DNA pool is so large, I'd like to ensure that all my lines are fully represented when matches go to look at it.

But $79 is a lot just to have a synced tree. I suppose their sale price (IF they even offer one) wouldn't be much better than $10-$20 off. I notice that their website is the only place to purchase FTM, unlike the company's other products.

[Craig Aldrich]

Today (Monday) was the last day for the $49 price for FTM 2019. The regular price is going to break $79 now.

[Susan Freas Rogers]

Craig, that's really odd, unless Monday was a one-day flash sale for President's Day. I was on the FTM website a few days ago and it was $79. I signed up for their email list and did not get any message about a sale price. Would have bought it. Oh well, not a rush, I'll wait for the next one.

[Susan Freas Rogers]

This item about GEDCOM was dated February 7, 2019 in the upcoming edition of the newsletter of the Western Pennsylvania Genealogical Society, but I'm guessing it should have been dated 2020.
Family History Hosting, LLC announced that version 1.03 of free GEDCOM Assessment resources including assess.ged. assess.ged is a special GEDCOM file you may use to test the GEDCOM import capability of any program that reads a GEDCOM file and imports the contents. By reviewing the results you can determine whether and how the target application handles various GEDCOM records and record combinations.

The GEDCOM Assessment web site at https://www.gedcomassessment.com/ now includes assessment results for fourteen popular programs, at https://www.gedcomassessment.com/en/...tm#assessments. End users should review the assessment result for any program they are using or considering using to educate themselves on data fields that may not transfer as expected between programs. For an overview of all the current assessments, see the Comparison Chart at https://www.gedcomassessment.com/en/...ison-chart.htm.

Several software publishers have used GEDCOM Assessment to assess their own programs, identify issues, and correct them. This is a great outcome for the genealogy community! The more programs comply with the GEDCOM standard, the
easier it is for genealogists and family historians to move data between programs.

In addition to software publishers, several interested end users have contributed assessments, another example where people in the genealogy community give freely of their time for the greater good.

Everyone is permitted to download and use assess.ged. There is no usage fee. assess.ged is copyrighted. You may edit assess.ged for your own use, but distribution of copies of assess.ged, amended or not, is prohibited.

[Barnbarroch]

Because you can't get all your multimedia from Reunion into Ancestry without going through FTM. If you import a Reunion produced Gedcom into Ancestry all you get is the bare-bones data - not all the other "stuff" you have in your Reunion tree.

Until Reunion and Ancestry work out a deal to allow Reunion to export tree data into Ancestry as you can with FTM we are stuck with the convoluted.

So why not just use FTM? (If Leister don't mind me asking!)

[lrberbach]

Thank you all for your helpful responses! I will probably purchase FTM and give it a whirl. My primary purpose for uploading all to Ancestry is to make sure that my research survives me. My children are very computer literate, but have no interest in genealogy at this point in their lives. My fear is that no one will keep the Reunion software up-to-date and all will be lost. I do maintain a website, but that needs maintenance as well. Short of printing out Family Group Sheets for all, I'm not sure what else I can do to ensure survival.

[lrberbach]

So why not just use FTM? (If Leister don't mind me asking!)

Or, bite the bullet, purchase FTM, sync to Ancestry and then just use Ancestry! LOL!
The thing is, I find working in Ancestry very unwieldy and frustrating. I have been a very long time loyal user of Reunion and love how it works. I just wish it would work better with Ancestry.

[Bob White]

Thank you all for your helpful responses! I will probably purchase FTM and give it a whirl. My primary purpose for uploading all to Ancestry is to make sure that my research survives me. My children are very computer literate, but have no interest in genealogy at this point in their lives. My fear is that no one will keep the Reunion software up-to-date and all will be lost. I do maintain a website, but that needs maintenance as well. Short of printing out Family Group Sheets for all, I'm not sure what else I can do to ensure survival.

Unknown to me how many ReunionTalk users subscribe to Dick Eastman's blog. He has written a number of well done articles on the subject of preserving one's work. The latest one a few days ago was just a short discussion but I'm pretty sure the blog is searchable. https://blog.eogn.com/2020/06/19/one...er/#more-37565

[lrberbach]

After a hiatus of a couple of years, I’m finally back to working on my genealogy. We completed a major downsizing and move from New York State to Florida in the midst of the pandemic.

Although contemplating this for quite a while, I only recently purchased a copy of FTM2019 so that I can GEDCOM my Reunion (my primary) information to FTM to Ancestry.com. I am generally happy with how the information transferred, but being a newbie at this, I have run into a couple of snags that I am hoping folks can help me untangle.

First, and most importantly, only parts of my sources transferred from Reunion to FTM- whatever was in the Reunion Title field. If nothing was in the Title field the source was labeled “untitled” in FTM. No other source information transferred.

Secondly, none of my Reunion Military Notes transferred to FTM. I see that the tag MILI is no longer recognized in GEDCOM 5.5.1. Is that the problem? Do I need to change the tag to NOTES in Reunion? Is there a better option?

Thirdly, I have a Reunion Note labelled Research which is where I keep all my research questions and tasks with a Reunion GEDCOM tag HIST that is apparently not used by GEDCOM 5.5.1. Is there a way to get that to be recognized in the Tasks tab in FTM?

Finally, (although I have not even begun to tackle multimedia) are there other Reunion tags that users have customized to better transfer to FTM and eventually Ancestry.com?