Friday, August 5, 2011

More Family Tree Maker 2012 Notes

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There is more news about the Family Tree Maker 2012 Public Beta:

1)  The FTM 2012 Public Beta has been updated to version 21.0.0.306 - see Ancestry Message - New Beta Update by Duff Wilson, which has a link to the latest download.  Anybody can download the program and install it.  Family Tree Maker wants users input, and the FTM Sync Beta message board is the place to tell them.  The developers say that many of the problems identified during the private beta and public beta have been addressed and corrected.

2)  Duff Wilson, one of the FTM 2012 developers, wrote Ancestry Message - Data Synchronization today, which defines which items are synchronized between Family Tree Maker 2012 and the Ancestry Member Tree, and which items in each of them are not synchronized.  This is a useful list, and is available from within the FTM 2012 program from the "Sync Now" dropdown list.

One of the items I noted in this post, and that is of major interest to me, is that:

"Sources that use the templates based on the book Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills, appear online, but can only be edited in Family Tree Maker"

That means that sources created when the user is in their Ancestry Member Tree will be in a general format (comparable to "free-form" in other programs).  Sources created using the Evidence! Explained templates in FTM 2012 will show up in the Ancestry tree, but cannot be edited in the online tree.  General (free-form) sources created, or already in, FTM 2012 can be edited in the Ancestry tree.  This makes my decision to use "free-form" source citations to avoid GEDCOM source mangling problems look good! 

In my earlier post, Some Family Tree Maker 2012 Sync Experiences, reader Genealady asked:

"So does FTM currently or in the future allow linking of all the sources from ancestry.com? I've never done source citation or documentation for my family tree yet because I have all the sources linked straight to it in Ancestry.com. I've also never wanted to download a GEDCOM and lose those associated sources...but if FTM currently or will allow that sort of linking of sources, I might just look into it..."

The short answer is, I think, yes.  In your Ancestry Member Tree, you can link to an Ancestry.com historical data record (or a tree item) and the source citation is attached to the Fact.  If you download that Ancestry Member Tree to a Family Tree Maker file, or through a GEDCOM file for some other program, that source citation is attached to the Fact.  However, the link to the data record on Ancestry.com is not downloaded, only the source citation (I think!) It's complicated!).  The drawback is that the Ancestry.com source citations leave a lot to be desired (as noted in previous blog posts by myself and others).  But - it is a source citation, which is better than having no source citation at all. 

If you have any of the Family Tree Maker program versions since 2008, you can do a Web Search from within the program, find historical records on Ancestry.com, and attach document images and source citations to Facts in your FTM tree.  If you upload the FTM tree to Ancestry and create a new Ancestry Member Tree, those source citations, and the document images, are uploaded.  That holds for the synchronizing function in FTM 2012, I believe. 

My work in the Family Tree Maker 2012 Public Beta have uncovered no major problems to date.  The only one that I've noted so far is when I've attached a media item to a source citation.  When synced with the Ancestry tree, it sometimes loses the media attachment to the source itself.  I attached some media while in the Ancestry tree, and some while in the FTM 2012 program.  This may have something to do with how I attached the media to the source or to the person - I haven't figured out why it happens for some media items and not for others.

2 comments:

Genealady said...

Very interesting! Thank you for addressing my question so thoroughly - I will look into FTM further!

Cousin Russ said...

Randy,

If you were to look at your AMT for that "missing media" file, isn't there a LINK to the Ancestry.com image for that Citation?

In the Beta email, there was a PDF attachment on how this feature works. For this case, it says

"media items attached to sources in Family Tree Maker will not be uploaded"

But in the Current AMT tree and when you download that tree into FTM2011, there are links from the Citation to the Media file in both the AMT and within Family Tree Maker. There is an option to download that Image into Family Tree Maker.

So, I think that if you look at your AMT tree, you will find a link to the Image on Ancestry.

Thank you for the coverage of this new feature.


Russ