Well, the big news of the day is that the world’s oldest genealogy software program (Family Tree Maker), which was first released in 1989 by Banner Blue, before being sold and rewritten a number of times since, ending up with Ancestry.com … is now being discontinued. (If you wish to check out a timeline history of Family Tree Maker, you can see it here).
The press release from Ancestry quotes the following …
Ancestry is proud to have made a significant investment this year to bring valuable new content and records to the Ancestry site … We’ve also introduced new features such as Ancestry Academy and major advancements for AncestryDNA.
True to this focus, we’ve taken a hard look at the declining desktop software market and the impact this has on being able to continue to provide product enhancements and support that our users need. With that, we’ve made the decision to stop selling Family Tree Maker as of December 31, 2015.
Our subscription business and website, on the other hand, continue to grow and we are doubling down our efforts to make that experience even better for our Ancestry community.
Ancestry will continue to support current owners of Family Tree Maker at least through January 1, 2017. During this time, all features of the software, including TreeSync, will continue to work, and Member Services will be available to assist with user questions. We will also address major software bugs that may occur, as well as compatibility updates.
These changes are never easy, but by focusing our efforts, we can concentrate on continuing to build great products for our loyal Ancestry community.
If you have inquiries regarding Family Tree Maker, please reach out to our Member Services team.
If you have Family Tree Maker and are now considering changing programs, here are links to those we recommend. All of them have demo versions, that allow you try them program out before buying.
![Importing Family Tree Maker (any version) into RootsMagic 7 [VIDEO]](https://www.gouldgenealogy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/logo-RootsMagic.jpg){kind=logo}
I would like to say I am so very very disappointed that ancestry is no longer going to support Family Tree Maker and a few of my friends feel the same, as I do,
I wish you all a happy Christmas and a happy New Year Carol Thompson in Western Australia
Can the Family Tree Maker program export my tree’s into Legacy?
Hi Sharon, to get your FTM tree into Legacy, you’ll have to save it as a gedcom file. Here’s a video how to do it: https://youtu.be/NbibAMhyxgU.