Let's try to be fair: Family Tree Maker helped thousands of people to
*begin* to learn about their family history, by being both a GEDCOM
editor and an online research tool. What changes in March is the online
research tools will be deliberately broken. The desktop software will
still work to edit GEDCOMs.
While there is a lot of dreck on
Ancestry.Com, there is also a lot of
gold. The original document scans, the (sometimes stolen) databases, the
mammoth transcription projects… they all add up to a big pile and I have
done a lot of very productive work there. But it takes being a
detective, and *insisting* on both logic and evidence. It is the same
with any genealogy resource: I spent years referencing a series of
errors in the Tanguay collection which I now know are wrong, and who
hasn't come across spelling errors or errors of fact in original documents?
We may all have experiences of how awful some of the family trees are,
how they propagate misinformation. But that means we have all used the
service because it also helped us find what we needed to know. Good and
bad, we need to develop our critical thinking skills to determine which
is which.
On 2016-01-28 08:28, Karen De Groote via wrote:
That is exactly why I NEVER linked my tree to Ancestry. My brother
did and
now he has such an inaccurate family tree it astounds me. That's what
linking with everyone does, perpetuates the errors and well as the
accurate. Very sad.
Karen
Becker, Scott and Stearns
On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 10:19 AM, Char Larson via <mngen(a)rootsweb.com>
wrote:
> Ancestry is retiring Family Tree Maker as of March 7, 2016. The software
> program was a great tool in research and to sync family trees to Ancestry.
> I have been a long time user of Family Tree Maker and a paying member of
> Ancestry. Ancestry now has millions of free family histories on THEIR
> servers along with all the information that we, as County Coordinators, put
> on our page and have spent years of researching and updating.
--
Wayne Saewyc
Marshall County marshallmnus.genweb.io