Genealogy Software Tutorials for Mac & PC
Find a Grave®* has become a popular website for documenting and locating burial information. According to SimilarWeb, it’s the #2 website for the “Community and Society/Decease” category, after Legacy.com, with 6.9 million unique monthly visitors.[1] By comparison, BillionGraves, a similar website, receives only 338,000 unique monthly visitors.
Source: SimilarWeb
[Read more…] about Best Practices for Find a Grave ContributorsIf you’re a registered owner of Family Tree Maker (FTM) 2019, by now you should have received an email from the developer, Software MacKiev, announcing a free update for both the Windows and Mac versions. The update is version 24.2.2, build 560, and it fixes problems to syncing that resulted from changes to Ancestry.com and caused the sync weather icon to go orange for about three months. According to an email from Software MacKiev president, Jack Minsky, they worked closely with Ancestry engineers and extensively beta-tested the update before releasing it. In fact, I received the initial email on Aug 12 stating the release was just a couple of days away, and then nothing. I finally received the actual release email on Sep 1 and promptly installed it. So far the update seems to be working smoothly, with syncing going back to green and happening very quickly. Today I pruned 7,000+ profiles from a tree and replaced them with new profiles from a different tree, syncing in two steps. The sync deleting the profiles went pretty fast, though uploading the new profiles took a little longer, but I don’t see any problems so far.
Software MacKiev says that, if syncing failed while the sync weather was orange, just try again after installing the update, and it should work. If you still have issues with syncing after the update is installed, click here for sync troubleshooting instructions, and if that doesn’t help, contact Live Chat at ftm.support/chat.
As always, make sure you have a full backup of your tree before you install the update. FTM will even ask you if you’ve made the backup first. You should first successfully compact your trees (click here for instructions) before backing them up. Software MacKiev suggests moving a copy of each backup to someplace outside your computer – ideally cloud storage or an external drive you can take to a secure location away from where your computer is located. I think this is overkill, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.
If you believe you’re a registered owner of FTM 2019 but still haven’t received the release email yet, make sure the email address you registered with is still available and, of course, check your spam folder. According to Software MacKiev, they’ve sent out all the email notifications. You can go to the Update Center and follow the on-screen instructions all the way through to the end to get your free download links. If that doesn’t work, we can only suggest that you contact Software MacKiev at their Live Chat page.
For more information about the free update, go here.
I received an email from Jack Minsky, President of Software MacKiev, with the following news:
The Family Tree Maker development team just finished up another free FTM 2019 update, version 24.2. It has significant improvements in performance and security and some useful new features – most notably a very handy relationship management tool. Joining existing tools for managing facts, historical events, sources and repositories, the new Relationship Manager tool in version 24.2 can change one relationship or thousands at a time. It is especially helpful when things have gotten off track. For example, you can use it to find all married people in your tree whose relationship type is mistakenly shown as “Unknown” and change them all at once to “Spouse”. If only fixing real relationships were that easy. Click here to get your copy of version 24.2.
“Family Tree Maker – an Update for You,” email dated 19 Feb 2023
I installed the update on my Mac without any issues and immediately tried out the new Relationship Manager tool. In the Mac version at least, it’s found in the Edit menu > Manage Relationships. Clicking on it brings up a window where you can choose a variety of Couple or Parent-Child relationship types in the upper drop-down, select the people you want to change, and choose the new relationship type in the lower drop-down. I didn’t even know I had 79 child relationships in my tree with an “unknown” relationship type. I was able to change 77 relationships to “biological” with the click of a button. As with any batch process, make sure you really want to change everyone. I had one child whom I still don’t know how he was related to the adults he was living with, so “unknown” is the most appropriate relationship.
It’s heart warming and amazing that that the Software MacKiev staff are still able to improve Family Tree Maker 2019 from the middle of a war zone in Kyiv, Ukraine. Ten percent of the sales of many genealogy products in the MacKiev store go to Ukrainian relief charities.
Sometimes family information can be found in the most unlikely places. I never would have thought of a collection of hair locks as a genealogical source, but I recently found images of one in the FamilySearch Family Tree. Mind you, I don’t use FSFT very often, due to all the problems I’ve written about.
[Read more…] about The Hair Lock Book – An Unusual Genealogy ToolI received an email from Software MacKiev yesterday announcing the availability of a free update to Family Tree Maker (FTM) 2019, bringing it to version 24.1 (build 520).
[Read more…] about Free Update to Family Tree Maker 2019 for Register Users