I'm also very disappointed with the entire process and product since Mackiev took over the FTM software. It took forever to get the syncing to work correctly and now, after all the initial hype, we've seen nothing that even resembles a significant update to the product. The old FTM16 was a great product but then Ancestry rewrote it and it's been a downhill path ever since. I had hoped that Mackiev would be taking the product to new levels but they've done pretty much nothing to it at all.
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Re: Not Happy with Update to FTM 2017
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Re: Not Happy with Update to FTM 2017
Totally unhappy as well
Was happy with previous versions
Can not get up search categories , freezes .
I have plenty of room on my laptop ....
Can you help me out Ancestry as I pay your subscription
Was happy with previous versions
Can not get up search categories , freezes .
I have plenty of room on my laptop ....
Can you help me out Ancestry as I pay your subscription
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Re: Not Happy with Update to FTM 2017
I have been using FTM since the early DOS days when FTM came on one, single sided 8 1/2 floppy. So yes I have seen and been through most of the head pains.
The syncing was not just an issue with FTM but the new servers that were being installed for Ancestry. It seems to be working at this time.
Also note that a lot of the syncing issues have been issues with ones owns database (tree) This include media that were to large or unsupported type.
Then there if one was to do a compact of the tree and perform external analysis other issues with the tree are cleared up.
Yes, there are still issue with the searching of Ancestry and FamilySearch, but I see this being more on the Ancestry and FamilySearch side than on the FTM side.
The syncing was not just an issue with FTM but the new servers that were being installed for Ancestry. It seems to be working at this time.
Also note that a lot of the syncing issues have been issues with ones owns database (tree) This include media that were to large or unsupported type.
Then there if one was to do a compact of the tree and perform external analysis other issues with the tree are cleared up.
Yes, there are still issue with the searching of Ancestry and FamilySearch, but I see this being more on the Ancestry and FamilySearch side than on the FTM side.
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Re: Not Happy with Update to FTM 2017
David pretty much hit the nail on the head. If MacKiev hadn't picked up FTM when Ancestry abandoned it we would have lost a great product. The latest MacKiev release (2017.1) works better for me than any of the previous releases.
Unfortunately MacKiev got caught up in Ancestry's (still) botched move to Amazon Web Services; the ongoing issues with sync frequently being red/orange (although much better than two months ago) and the search issue are both almost 100% on the Ancestry side.
As far as new features I am hopeful that MacKiev sold/sells enough copies of FTM to warrant investing more resources into continuing upgrades. I'm sure MacKiev took a big hit when the implementation of the new sync dragged out for many months.
Unfortunately MacKiev got caught up in Ancestry's (still) botched move to Amazon Web Services; the ongoing issues with sync frequently being red/orange (although much better than two months ago) and the search issue are both almost 100% on the Ancestry side.
As far as new features I am hopeful that MacKiev sold/sells enough copies of FTM to warrant investing more resources into continuing upgrades. I'm sure MacKiev took a big hit when the implementation of the new sync dragged out for many months.
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Partners and adopted parents
In todays day and age where there are no marriages and the possibilities of finding adopted parents you would thing the package could differentiate between them and show them as partners not married.
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Re: Partners and adopted parents
It can.
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Re: Partners and adopted parents
I have several such couples in my files. You can change the nature of the relationship to make them "friends". When you run the genealogy report, the wording is changed from "He married xxxx" to "he met xxxx". You can also set the nature of parent/child relationship to natural or adopted or unknown. I even have a couple of situations where a child has a natural parent in my tree and also an adopted parent in my tree. Works great!
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Re: Partners and adopted parents
I've certainly recorded adopted parents, but I'm a bit puzzled about step-parents. Surely the "step-" relationship is implicit in the existing data - if a man is widowed and remarries, isn't his new wife is automatically the step-mother of his children by his previous wife? There seems no need to explicitly add a "step-parent" relationship in FTM (or Ancestry).
I'd welcome any advice on what people do in their own trees. Thanks.
I'd welcome any advice on what people do in their own trees. Thanks.
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Marriage dates not being merged
I recently noticed that when sourcing a marriage record in FTM2107 that the marriage date is not being imported. It will show on the right side but then nothing happens with it. Anyone else notice this or have a fix?
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Re: "Your Search returned zero good matches"
Hi
Yes, your workaround did give results but the only parameter that matches is the persons name, everything else seems random. The birth years were completely out for instance and none of the other search items contributed to the results either.
This error, and the categories issue, has been like this for weeks now, I wonder if they are ever going to fix it.
I am really having second thoughts about FTM.
Yes, your workaround did give results but the only parameter that matches is the persons name, everything else seems random. The birth years were completely out for instance and none of the other search items contributed to the results either.
This error, and the categories issue, has been like this for weeks now, I wonder if they are ever going to fix it.
I am really having second thoughts about FTM.
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Re: Not Happy with Update to FTM 2017
I am not seeing any of the problems you are reporting.
I see search categories. Attaching image files is fast.
The only issues I see happen when the Ancestry data center gets over loaded with all the new users and they suspend synchronization for hours or days.
Can you tell us the specifications of your computer and size of your tree?
Do you regularly compact your family tree file?
Mac or PC?
How much ram? What processor? How much disk space? SSD or mechanical hard drive? How much free space on your drives? What operating system?
Which version of FTM are you running?
I see search categories. Attaching image files is fast.
The only issues I see happen when the Ancestry data center gets over loaded with all the new users and they suspend synchronization for hours or days.
Can you tell us the specifications of your computer and size of your tree?
Do you regularly compact your family tree file?
Mac or PC?
How much ram? What processor? How much disk space? SSD or mechanical hard drive? How much free space on your drives? What operating system?
Which version of FTM are you running?
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Re: "Your Search returned zero good matches"
Without knowing the details of what you are trying to find and how, one can not tell if it is an error of the interface or not.
The workaround was to show everyone how to get a working search interface in FTM. Both with the default broad search that FTM is being limited to and a workaround so focused searches can be performed.
Though as of this weekend, do not bother to make a web link like I show in the video. I discovered Sunday that the made weblink now results in the web clipper showing rather than the merge feature. But it still works if you type in the url shown in the web address in the video after the default broad search shows.
... Crafting a good search is another thing. What constitutes a good search will vary by who, when and what you are seeking along with how much or how little information you use to perform that search.
And a computer program/interface is only as good as what the user tells it to search for and how to handle that data.
Here are some search tips.
If your results come back with a wide range of birth years then edit your search to narrow down the time span. Instead of entering no year or just a year like 1855. Try limiting the year to one like 1855 with exact checked, or use the +/- modifier to use a narrow time span like +/- 1 year or +/- 2 or +/- 5.
If you know the person should be in a particular town/township or county or state, do an exact search on that location. If you are not finding them and you know they have to be there -- try a search without using any name by looking for any male (or female if the person is a she) of the age of your person born in the locality your person . If the name was slaughtered by the enumerator you will likely find the person if you think how can the name be mis-heard/mis-spelled ... unless he/she was completely missed.
Trying to find a family? Search by the youngest kids (too young to be farmed out) or the one with the unusual/not common name. There are less kids on the census usually than adults so the results list is usually shorter.
Still can't find someone? Flip the given name and surname. I've found quite a few families with the names reversed and once you look at the actual census page you see why -- because that is how it was written down. Example: I searched Gottlieb Peter (his name) which never returned a result but a search Peter Gottlieb and there he was on the census.
Turn on the search initials option. An exact search of a name generally does not bring back just initials if you are searching a name.
If a family has lived at the same place for decades but you can't find them on a census year, search for the neighbors who've also lived there a long time. Your family's name might have been slaughtered or sit in a very dark or very light portion of the page making the name unreadable to the indexer.
You generally have more search parameter options when searching a single collection in one search (focused search) then when trying to search for anything and everything in one search (a broad search.) Searching a single collection gets you search parameters based on what was indexed in that collection. Searching multiple collections in one search only gets you those search parameters that are in common among those collections.
Tree hints are a completely different situation.
And honestly in the trouble-some situations when an ancestor is being difficult about being found, sometimes it is easier (and the performance faster) to just bring up Ancestry in your favorite web browser and do the search there. Then once you have finally found the person, repeat the search inside FTM so you can merge the data.
The workaround was to show everyone how to get a working search interface in FTM. Both with the default broad search that FTM is being limited to and a workaround so focused searches can be performed.
Though as of this weekend, do not bother to make a web link like I show in the video. I discovered Sunday that the made weblink now results in the web clipper showing rather than the merge feature. But it still works if you type in the url shown in the web address in the video after the default broad search shows.
... Crafting a good search is another thing. What constitutes a good search will vary by who, when and what you are seeking along with how much or how little information you use to perform that search.
And a computer program/interface is only as good as what the user tells it to search for and how to handle that data.
Here are some search tips.
If your results come back with a wide range of birth years then edit your search to narrow down the time span. Instead of entering no year or just a year like 1855. Try limiting the year to one like 1855 with exact checked, or use the +/- modifier to use a narrow time span like +/- 1 year or +/- 2 or +/- 5.
If you know the person should be in a particular town/township or county or state, do an exact search on that location. If you are not finding them and you know they have to be there -- try a search without using any name by looking for any male (or female if the person is a she) of the age of your person born in the locality your person . If the name was slaughtered by the enumerator you will likely find the person if you think how can the name be mis-heard/mis-spelled ... unless he/she was completely missed.
Trying to find a family? Search by the youngest kids (too young to be farmed out) or the one with the unusual/not common name. There are less kids on the census usually than adults so the results list is usually shorter.
Still can't find someone? Flip the given name and surname. I've found quite a few families with the names reversed and once you look at the actual census page you see why -- because that is how it was written down. Example: I searched Gottlieb Peter (his name) which never returned a result but a search Peter Gottlieb and there he was on the census.
Turn on the search initials option. An exact search of a name generally does not bring back just initials if you are searching a name.
If a family has lived at the same place for decades but you can't find them on a census year, search for the neighbors who've also lived there a long time. Your family's name might have been slaughtered or sit in a very dark or very light portion of the page making the name unreadable to the indexer.
You generally have more search parameter options when searching a single collection in one search (focused search) then when trying to search for anything and everything in one search (a broad search.) Searching a single collection gets you search parameters based on what was indexed in that collection. Searching multiple collections in one search only gets you those search parameters that are in common among those collections.
Tree hints are a completely different situation.
And honestly in the trouble-some situations when an ancestor is being difficult about being found, sometimes it is easier (and the performance faster) to just bring up Ancestry in your favorite web browser and do the search there. Then once you have finally found the person, repeat the search inside FTM so you can merge the data.
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Problems generating reports, charts etc...and still can't sync
I have a family reunion coming up this Sunday, (with 300 plus people), and after I updated my tree, I tried to update & print a descendant chart, genealogy report, kinship report etc....the chart kept putting 6 identical b. dates for each individual! I spent almost 2 hours on live chat, jumped through many hoops & now all 10 of my trees are gone from FTM, (granted, I can hopefully put them back with my backed up files), but really?! The tree in question...I had to export as a GEDCOM and open it in FTM in order to create the things I needed for the reunion.
AND my sync status has been in orange FOREVER! I've been using FTM since 2005 and was always able to print what I needed to prepare for the reunion...until now :(
Just starting to wonder if there is any better software out there? The sync was what kept me coming back, but it's just not worth the trouble. Mostly a vent I guess, but I'll take any suggestions!
AND my sync status has been in orange FOREVER! I've been using FTM since 2005 and was always able to print what I needed to prepare for the reunion...until now :(
Just starting to wonder if there is any better software out there? The sync was what kept me coming back, but it's just not worth the trouble. Mostly a vent I guess, but I'll take any suggestions!
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Re: Problems generating reports, charts etc...and still can't sync
The syncing has been much worse for me after the so-called "maintenance upgrade" - but it is just about usable. MacKiev's blog (at https://support.mackiev.com/336868-Sync-Outages-for-FTM-2017) rather disingenuously says "we’ve been seeing green sync weather mixed with intermittent interruptions, which cause red sync weather and are followed by an hour of orange weather" but the reality for me is that I very rarely see green, mostly orange (as it is now), but frequently red or even "appears to be offline". The optional "sync status" indicator on the top-right sync icon, added in the update, is also broken and therefore untrustworthy, frequently showing red when the alert shows orange, or vice versa.
I could spend all day waiting for green, so I just sync on orange after the usual backups. I do find the "best practice" guff on the alert (still dated 9th June, with an annoyingly smug "Welcome back to green" message) about taking backups irritating, for three reasons:
1) A properly designed sync system should NEVER fail, even if interrupted, and should always just transparently roll back or roll forward automatically. This whole weather alert system, that they claim they've done us a big favour in implementing, should never even have been necessary.
2) If a user can take a backup before a sync, and decide whether to restore one if it fails, then FTM could and should do that automatically itself instead.
3) There's no clear explanation of how to decide if a sync has failed and a backup needs to be restored. If it freezes or crashes? If it shows an error? (and what error?) If the status changes to red or orange during or after the sync completes? [edit: or if we painstakingly compare before-and-after gedcom exports to see if anything has been corrupted?]
As a retired professional developer who among other things wrote complex sync systems, to me the Family Sync is essentially a poorly designed unreliable system, and Ancestry/MacKiev seem to be admitting that by effectively saying "always take backups in case our system goes wrong, so then it's your responsibility for any problems or data loss, not ours"
I could spend all day waiting for green, so I just sync on orange after the usual backups. I do find the "best practice" guff on the alert (still dated 9th June, with an annoyingly smug "Welcome back to green" message) about taking backups irritating, for three reasons:
1) A properly designed sync system should NEVER fail, even if interrupted, and should always just transparently roll back or roll forward automatically. This whole weather alert system, that they claim they've done us a big favour in implementing, should never even have been necessary.
2) If a user can take a backup before a sync, and decide whether to restore one if it fails, then FTM could and should do that automatically itself instead.
3) There's no clear explanation of how to decide if a sync has failed and a backup needs to be restored. If it freezes or crashes? If it shows an error? (and what error?) If the status changes to red or orange during or after the sync completes? [edit: or if we painstakingly compare before-and-after gedcom exports to see if anything has been corrupted?]
As a retired professional developer who among other things wrote complex sync systems, to me the Family Sync is essentially a poorly designed unreliable system, and Ancestry/MacKiev seem to be admitting that by effectively saying "always take backups in case our system goes wrong, so then it's your responsibility for any problems or data loss, not ours"
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Re: Not Happy with Update to FTM 2017
The missing categories issue is a known problem, acknowledged by Ancestry/MacKiev in their blog (https://support.mackiev.com/892800-Empty-Ancestry-Search-Res...) although it doesn't seem to affect everyone - it's certainly nothing to do with the client machine spec. The spec will affect performance of course, but although I find FTM2017 is much improved after the update, it's still "mediocre" at best, even on my top-range laptop (i7, 32GB RAM, 1TB m.2 SSD). Performance will depend very much on the size of your tree, number of citations, media etc., but although it's usable now, I can often wait a number of seconds for simple changes, such as adding or removing profile images or applying colour coding, to take effect. I suspect it's mostly down to the .NET and other Enterprise libraries that I think SMK used in re-implementing FTM2017, which although no doubt making development and maintenance easier, can have a severe impact on performance depending on how (in-)efficiently they're used. Given the history of FTM2017 under SMK, I don't expect that situation to improve dramatically any time soon :-(
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Re: Problems generating reports, charts etc...and still can't sync
PS in spite of all my moaning, I still like and stick with FTM2017 and Ancestry (although to be fair I do most of my research on Ancestry, using FTM mainly for "housekeeping"). I feel more comfortable with them than any of the alternatives. I think the one seemingly trivial thing that I value most is the "proper" family tree displays and the ability to move around them freely. Nothing else, even FMP, seems to come close to this, and I'd feel lost without it. :-)
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Re: Fact Merging Utility?
The note about editing fact groups in 2009 was very interesting, but the link is no longer there.
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Re: Fact Merging Utility?
You're surprised that a link in an eight year old post doesn't work?
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Re: Fact Merging Utility?
See if this article will help you. https://support.mackiev.com/933630-Merging-Duplicate-Facts-i...
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Re: Problems generating reports, charts etc...and still can't sync
For "now all 10 of my trees are gone from FTM". Likely they are still on your hard drive. Please do File > Open in FTM and then browse to the location where your trees are stored. Look for the .ftm files select one and click ok. It should open in FTM. Repeat for the rest of the trees. Your recent tree list will repopulate as you open each one.
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