Ancesty.com is Discontinuing Family Tree Maker!!

Citing the decline in the desktop software market Ancestry.com is making one of the stupidest decisions I have ever seen.  They are discontinuing their Family Tree Maker.  Sales will end at the end of this year and support will end in 2017. 

Why is this the worst idea I have seen:

1. I don't know a single serious genealogist that doesn't use some sort of desktop software to organize their database.  They use it to:

• Create charts and reports
• Show a view of a tree for relatives and other people
• Detect anomalies in their tree.

2. FTM downloaded all of the images and media that I attached to my tree automatically.  Now I guess I have to go back and download all of my media that I have been storing inside of Family Tree Maker.

3.  It gave us a good way to use Ancestry but still maintain our data separately and a way that we could be independent from Ancestry's service if we wanted to.

I am pretty mad!


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All of Tom Pick's Eiffel Germany Survey in a Single Downloadable Query-able File!!!

I am very pleased to say I am finished compiling all of Tom Pick's Eiffel Germany Birth and Death survey into a single query-able file, and you can download it right here!

I cannot imagine how long it took Tom to originally put together his website and obtain all of those records.  He will be sorely missed and I only wish he had longer on this earth so he could have done more.  He compiled about 550,000 birth records and many thousands of marriage records from over 650 cities in Germany.  They weren't perfect and there are some errors, but it's an amazingly valuable resource.  His original website with the records in separate city files are here.

The fields in the database are the same as Tom used with explanations are:

MO - Month of birth
DA - Day of Birth
YEAR - Year of Birth
FatherLast - Last name of father
FatherFirst - First name of father
MotherLast - Last name of mother
MotherFirst - First name of mother
Marriage - Marriage date of mother and father(only recorded in one record for each family if he                           found it)
ChildName - First and middle name of child born on date in MO, DA, and YEAR fields
SpouseName - Spouse of child in ChildName field if found

You can download the single file in csv, xlsx (Excel format), or in Access 2013 database format BELOW!!, just click on the blue box.



-Jamie