Geoff A.
Family Tree Maker and Ancestry
Family Tree Maker and Ancestry ------------------------------------- My response to Ancestry's reply: A curious response from Ancestry to approach McKiev to ensure this doesn't happen again. It won't happen again to me as I will not ever again sync. I'd imagine these two companies have some form of contract/agreement to allow syncing and any issues that arise. My FTM is more or less fixed or in the process of being fixed. My Ancestry tree data will no longer be fixed by me. Ancestry doesn't make it easy to do so and in any event I'm removing myself from that product. The end result is that there are hundreds of defective data points in My Ancestry not of my doing...which in the order of things will be offered up to other subscribed Ancestry Customers, as hints going forward. I'll leave you, Ancestry, to deal with McKiev to fix your data as I won't be. ------------------------------------- It's hard to work out which product is at the root of this review so both products will receive the same worded review:- Family Tree Maker (FTM) and Ancestry are connected, in that syncing of data to and from Ancestry and FTM is a feature. It relies on you having a paid up subscription to Ancestry it seems. At the outset I've now cancelled my subscription to Ancestry but will persevere with FTM as a standalone database as I'm at the stage of finessing my data only. On that, I've often wondered how useful some Ancestry data is. It relies on other individuals standards and its plain to see, when some so called genealogists aim for quantity rather than quality. I know of numerous trees that exceed ridiculously high numbers above 10 to 25000 names many aiming for a Duke, Lord, Royalty, Clan Chief at the head. Truth is most of us don't go back that far, in actual real records. Point of this review is to warn others not to hope that syncing is failsafe. If my recent experience is anything to go by, avoid it at all costs, is my advice. In hindsight, I foolishly I ran the sync tool in FTM. It took and unearthly length of time (which was a clue but no way to abort it without turning the computer off) and at the (the so called successful with no error messages) end, the carnage it created in both environments was soul destroying. My Ancestry Tree now has many individuals displaying the "~blank f i" label and in FTM missing connections (although most data is still stored but no longer linked to the actual tree. Not the easiest to reinstate! I ended up with 500+ duplicated individuals (some more the twice) that I had to merge labouriously over about 3 plus hours. Plus then there are now all the duplicate media (pictures) now attached to many individuals. I dare not try and fix. I could restore using a previous backup (I save to backup several times a day) but from experience that doesn't always make things better and work is required fixing stuff ..been there done that. So, many years of careful research muddled up substantially through no fault of mine. Reading some other reviews this is not an unknown issue and possibly something to do with server failures at one end or other. Please treat this as an advisory from someone who is no stranger to genealogy or IT.