December 19, 2015

What to Do About the Discontinuation of Family Tree Maker

Ancestry.com recently announced it will discontinue making its acclaimed FTM (Family Tree Maker) software, and there are a lot of angry customers. Their blog is full of comments from displeased people. Ancestry has not offered any suggestions for alternate solutions. The only explanation the company has offered is that it does not see any profit in desktop software going forward, and so will focus on online offerings. This means people who have used Ancestry.com solely to build their family tree will have to keep up an annual membership to the site to be able to access all the work they have done on their family tree. The information on the site will also be stored in the cloud, so if the cloud or Ancestry ever goes down or out of business, people stand to lose their family trees. This can sometimes represent decades of work.