Ancestry.com to discontinue Family Tree Maker

Family Tree: Ancestry.com to discontinue Family Tree Maker

So you may have heard that Ancestry is planning to discontinue their Family Tree Maker (FTM for short) program. They will stop selling it at the end of this year, but it will still be usable. However at the beginning of 2017 all of the features associated with FTM will stop working.

I understand Ancestry deciding to not provide future versions of the program or even updates of the current version, but to make it stop working entirely? That means they have to change code on Ancestry.com to stop letting FTM work. They are making work for themselves to make something stop working. It just doesn’t make sense.

I’m not a huge user of FTM. Mostly because when I upgraded to FTM 2014 my tree did not properly set up and though the program says my tree is synced with the one online, it actually isn’t. Support members in the Ancestry forums could only recommend that I de-link the tree’s, download the Gedcom from Ancestry, then re-upload under a different name to the Ancestry website and link it to the FTM program. And yeah that would have worked, but my tree would be under a name I didn’t want, as well as none of the documentation, photo’s, etc coming with it and I didn’t/don’t have the money to get a year’s membership and redo everything. So I stuck with just working on my tree on Ancestry.com. Honestly I mostly worked on my tree there anyway and only used FTM when I needed to create files, like event lists, or to create family outlines, etc. If I need to do that now, I just re-upload the current Gedcom to FTM. After FTM is discontinued, I’ll have to find another program to do all that.

What’s your take on FTM being discontinued? Are you a current user? If so, what do you plan to do when it goes away in about a year? Let me know in the comments.

4 Replies to “Ancestry.com to discontinue Family Tree Maker”

  1. I am very disappointed in this development. I work almost exclusively offline. I only sync my online tree once in a while. I believe I may just remove the online tree and forget about Ancestry completely. I am guessing the “leaf” function will go away in 2017.

    I believe they are blowing smoke about the product not being used. It is probably that the marketplace has matured and there is not as many sales as there used to be. FTM 2014 seems to work just fine and has about all the features that I can see a researcher really needing. FTM 2012 was a whole different story. It totally messed up my sources in the import from 2010. I am still trying to get that all sorted out. Many of my sources got deleted completely. I lost my good backup of my 2010 data so I was in a pickle.

    1. Hey Wendell, thanks for your comment.

      From the other articles and everything that I have found, plenty of people are using (or were using) FTM 2014, so I have no idea where Ancestry got that idea from. I believe that someone said in an article (that of course I didn’t save) that the program will still work after 2017, but there would not be any further updates. I think that would be a much better solution that just closing it down completely.

  2. This plan totally sucks. I have had problems with FTM but adding files is so much easier using sync. I have had FTM since the first edition and have added every upgrade. I don’t even remember how I did add things before sync? For me it is a lot easier going through FTM on my computer to see things than it is to do it on Ancestry. I guess when you have bought just about everything associated with Genealogy you can do what you want and could care less about your customers.

    1. Ancestry announced the other day that the company which produced the MAC version is going to assume responsibility for future editions of the Windows product as well. Sync and other features are supposed to continue.

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