Many of you may not realize that I’ve been unable to synchronize my tree updates to Ancestry for the last 9 months. There was a corruption problem that forced me to break the sync between Family Tree Maker and Ancestry. I’ve left the tree up there but changed the name to reflect that it was retired.

Despite all of my attempts nothing I tried would work and every attempt takes/wastes a full day, if not more, before it failed. I’d been holding out hope that the new Family Tree Maker 2024 would help me resolve the issues and allow me to get it back online.

However, 2024 has come and gone and the new product hasn’t even reached beta testing yet and news of the version was recently pulled from their website without explanation.

In a moment of frustration this last weekend, I tried a very simple tree upload of a brand new tree with a single member named “babbunabridged.com” of all things. I first synced it with absolutely nothing else in it and it worked. I then imported about 100 names and synced again. SUCCESS!!

Link to the new tree: Ancestry: babbunabridged.com

In successively conducted ever larger imports and I’ve synced as many as 11,000 new people in a single import. I’ve now gotten the file synced with 23,549 people in it and am working on the “Mother of All Imports” of the remaining ~20,000 people. It’s important to note here that with each new record the program moves ever so slightly slower on the next one. It adds up and the screenshot you see at the top of this article is the current state after 25.5-hours. I’m estimating that it will take between 8-10 days in all before it is all combined again on my laptop. By the way, yes there are numerous backups of everything, so no data is in jeopardy.

Next Steps:

1. After the Family Tree Maker Import is complete, I’ll work to sync the tree up to Ancestry again and am cautiously optimistic that it will succeed this time. That will place all the people up there. But it won’t yet include the files.
2. To upload the files, I’ll follow a similar process of marking increasingly larger sections as available for upload and resyncing (they are all currently restricted to help smooth the process of getting the people and data up into the cloud). Eventually, that will be completed but may also take another week.

Yes, this is a huge pain! But it keeps me away from the news of the day, which is most welcome for me at this moment in time. I also view it as necessary for a healthy dialog of weak spots that need improvement.

In the meantime, I can make virtually no changes to the data in the tree while the current import completes.

I’ve got one last article to post today in addition to this post. After that I’ll be on hiatus until the sync completes. See you on the other side!

Cheers!