Family Tree Maker for Mac 3.1

I’m returning to Family Tree Maker for Mac.

Tech Tuesday

In December 2015, I ranted about how unhappy I was that Family Tree Maker was being dropped by Ancestry as a product. I did consider staying with Family Tree Maker 3 for Mac; however, I kept having problems the synchronization of my tree with Ancestry was corrupting my database. So, I decided to search for alternative products.  I wished that Legacy Family Tree had a Mac version and I wanted Roots Magick 7 to have a real Mac product and not a runtime windows version.  Besides the weird file locations (C: and F: drives), I never could get the fonts correct and details displayed in inconsistent ways. I tried several other products, Mac Family Tree, Reunion, and Heredis.  I settled on Heredis and have used it for the past year but I’ve been having problems with it.  When I zoom into some of my sources, the system crashes, sends a crash report to Apple (who is supposed to send it on to Heredis) and then allows me to restart.  It seems that details that I cut and pasted from a website, which has several different fonts and hyperlinks seem to be the culprits. I finally decided to drop Heredis because of this and use something else for my 2017 research. I decided on using Roots Magic 7, exported my two large research files from Heredis to GED format, importing them into Roots Magic, then began working with them.

Then I received the notification that Family Tree Maker has been re-released by MacKiev.  The upgrade from FTM 14 for windows and FTM 3 for Mac was free.  I decided to upgrade and give it a try. I exported my two Roots Magic files to GED format then imported them into FTM.

Wow.  I was immediately reminded of how much I liked Family Tree Maker Mac 3 when I reviewed it in December 2013. I began working on one of my projects, Project Drexl, and saw how nice it was to work with.  Clearly designed for Mac, all the features worked. There were many features that Heredis didn’t have that I was really happy to have back, such as a calendar function. (For example, a calendar of all my ancestors who had birthdays in January.) Also, and probably the biggest thing, was that there are templates for sources that follows Elizabeth Shown Mills’ Evidence Explained.  Linking sources to facts is easy. I liked navigation through family members a bit better with Heredis, but the FTM method is fine.

I haven’t tried to upload and sync my FTM files with Ancestry, yet; and I am not certain that I will do so.  I may just upload what I have with FTM and then break the link. In any event, I’m hoping that Ancestry’s on-line tree isn’t the master of all.

So far, I’m very happy that Family Tree Maker is back and I am looking forward to using it over the next year or so. I think they may have gotten me back.