Genealogy Chat

I have just ordered (not yet received or installed) FTM 2012. I did like the idea of being able to use it in in tandem with my Ancestry (main) tree.

Now I was recently in an exchange of correspondence on GR with someone who had several names in his tree in common with mine - we were very distantly connected. He told me he too had his main tree on Ancestry Therefore when I saw on the Ancestry contact information a lot of recent updates to his tree including to my names, I tried to check it out but for at least four or five days now I only get the answer "Family Tree Maker is updating this tree".

This seems to be a very sticky process - what is the experience of others?

I have recently installed FTM12 & to be honest I find it a bit of a pain in the rear.
It won´t let you do anything until you have updated anything you have done on Ancestry.
Still haven´t worked out whether it´s supposed to update as you go along or not. Mine certainly doesn´t.

You have to select Plan, then it will tell you that a Sync is needed. A tab marked Sync Now will be displayed, which you need to click.

The time it takes will depend on how many updates there are. I synch mine fairly frequently and it only takes a minute or two. My largest tree has less than 4,000 entries though.

thank you both - I haven't installed it yet and must tidy up some errors in the Ancestry tree before I do! and will follow KenSE's tips when I do instal it. Hope wisechild gets the programme to work for her eventually!

I am still getting this message that FTM is doing my contact's tree - I have emailed Ancestry to ask if it is a technical hitch

I purchased FTM 2012 before Xmas and initially the sync worked well and trees on both were updated at start automatically as programmed.

The Sync stopped some time in February and has been a pain in the butt ever since. With mine I can cancel the Sync and proceed working with FTM
but it only cancels FTM, so if you don't go on to your Ancestry tree and cancel
the sync there, it will just keep rolling which is possibly happening with your contact.

They would need to sign in to Ancestry and cancel the Sync. Have you no other way to contact them to let them know there is a problem?

thanks for this - I will I think proceed with caution! I will wait and see what sort of answer I get from Ancestry - and if it is some sort of standard brushoff I will let my contact know what is happening to his tree, via both GR and Ancestry.

I have recently been in touch with Ay TS about this. They say they have fixed the problems and synch is now working again. All the same I can see that it is still running about 15 days behind. Many people prefer FTM 2011 to 2012.

Ay have launched an app for Android & iOS. It is really good even on a phone and magic on a tablet.

Thank you Rollo - I'll keep watching.

It is perhaps unkind of me to say this - but I think GR will be glad to have it known that other genealogy providers have computer programming problems as well!