I’m not all that happy with this upgrade to Family Tree Maker 2012. There are many things I like about it, but the whole reason I paid for the upgrade was because I was very excited about having my Ancestry.com tree sync with the tree on my computer in my Family Tree Maker program.
More and more of my family has become involved with working on our lineage and I wanted all of our information to be on Ancestry.com so family members can keep up with progress, but have my tree in my computer, for reports and such.
Supposedly, I can sync my trees with Family Tree Maker 2012. That doesn’t seem to be the case for me.
First problem that I encountered was I couldn’t sync the tree I already had on Ancestry.com to the tree I already had on Family Tree Maker. You can only upload one and then sync it, or download your tree from Ancestry and sync it.
My dilemma with that was, I had about 350 more people on my Family Tree Maker program that I did on my Ancestry Tree. Since I have spent many hours connecting my Ancestry tree to other family members, photo’s and other information, I didn’t want to lose those connection’s by uploading a new tree.
Thinking I had no choice, because I didn’t want to have to reenter all the people and their information, I downloaded my Ancestry.com tree and I merged it to my tree in Family Tree Maker. Then I spent days cleaning up the mess that it caused. Then I uploaded that tree to Ancestry, creating tree number two on my account just so I could sync my tree.
Nightmare number two commenced. Pictures went everywhere, sources got linked to multiple people they didn’t belong to, so on and so on. So, I started working on cleaning up that mess. Then about day two, the tree stopped syncing. After countless emails to Ancestry, their solution – keep trying.
I gave up. After three days.
Ancestry.com support says “Keep Trying”. That’s what the program tells me as well. That however, is not helping me one iota.
Not to be beaten by a program, I decided to download my original tree because I really didn’t want to lose those connections anyway, and I spent another two days adding the 350 people who weren’t in this tree, and the syncing worked fine.
Until two days ago. I got the error message again, and still today, it will not sync. I’m not sure why I thought I could go to bed and it would work fine today, but it is what it is.
So, Ancestry.com and Family Tree Maker people, listen up!! You better do something besides tell me to keep on trying, or I will discontinue the $30 a month I am currently sending you. I’m not wasting any more of my life trying to make your program work.
Neither of the two trees I have spent the past week and a half working on will sync at all.
Am I the only one that is having this problem?? I would really like to hear from some other Family Tree Maker users.
