TreeSync, for those who don’t know, is the feature of Family Tree Maker (FTM) that allows it to sync with family trees on Ancestry.com. At least, it was. Ancestry stopped selling FTM in 2015 (see Ancestry just killed off Family Tree Maker and Managing the FTM transition), then sold it to Software MacKiev (their existing partner for publishing FTM on the Mac) in 2016 and announced that RootsMagic would also sync with Ancestry family trees (see Ancestry comes up with solutions for FTM users).

Over the past year that Software MacKiev has owned FTM, they’ve come out with a single small update that mostly fixed things behind the scenes, and updated the software so it showed Software MacKiev as the publisher. If you look at the above About boxes, you’ll noticed that as it is the Mac version, both were actually created by Software MacKiev, although they were the publisher only in the newer version.

Yesterday, Ancestry announced that TreeSync would cease to work on March 29, just 9 days later, and would be replaced by a feature called FamilySync in FTM. In order to use FamilySync, however, you would need to upgrade to a new version of FTM. That upgrade costs $29.95 if you order in advance of the release, and will cost $39.95 when the software is released (expected to be on March 31).

While I am an owner of FTM, and even upgraded to the latest version just a couple of months ago, I still have not received an e-mail from Software MacKiev about the upgrade. They now have two pages on their web site, both updated today, about the upgrade – Family Tree Maker 2017 FAQ and FamilySync to replace TreeSync in FTM 2017.

MacKiev says the upgrade was announced simultaneously with Ancestry yesterday, although that’s strange since I haven’t received an e-mail yet. Who did they announce it to if not their customers? Were they planning to wait until after the $10 discount is over?

In any case, it is strange that they’re only giving customers 9 days to do a paid upgrade in order to keep a major feature of FTM. This reminds me of the way a lot of people felt when Ancestry first announced that they were stopping the sales of FTM back in 2015 without giving customers any kind of transition plan.

Also strange is that Ancestry did not mention the status of RootsMagic’s integration with Ancestry. Both FTM and RootsMagic were supposed to be using the same method to sync with Ancestry, and while it’s not up to Ancestry when RootsMagic releases its version with support for syncing, one would think they would at least mention that it would be supported by RootsMagic soon as well. It’s especially strange since RootsMagic previewed their sync feature, called TreeShare, on their blog earlier this month.

In addition to the ‘new’ FamilySync feature, the new version of FTM (dubbed FTM 2017) also includes integration with FamilySearch, a ‘color coding’ feature and a photo editor.

If you’re interested in upgrading to the new version, and like me have not gotten an e-mail yet, you can get the upgrade by going to one of the following geographic-based edition links – United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Apparently these editions correspond to which version of Ancestry you are subscribed to, and you need to have the correct edition that matches the version of Ancestry to which you subscribe. I’m not sure what would happen if you bought the US version (the cheapest by the way) and tried to connect to a different version of Ancestry.