about building my tree from what I can see. I would assume you could.....otherwise they have a terrible business model.

And syncs with it as you go. So, changes that you make on Ancestry.com can be imported to your FTM 2012 and vice versa with just a click of a button (Sync Now).

I am so addicted to that feature!!! And hints... I can't stop looking at my hints on Ancestry.com

I renewed my membership there for a month after a hiatus of a few years and found a smidgen of information, but not enough to justify keeping the account active.

Anyway, I was getting all excited looking at the hints and entering what I thought was fascinating family info until I realized that one branch of the family having alleged roots back to British royalty (Eleanor of Aquitaine, etc) was a bunch of bullshit.

One of my ancestors got attached to a guy who ended up being the Bishop of the Church, and for whom there were no substantiated descendants. Yes, he was a descendant of royalty, but there were no actual records of him having any children himself. Sometimes in working backward through time, you also have to turn around and work forward.

another annoying thing I found was people entering ancestors who, on investigation, have birth dates some years AFTER the children they supposedly had. There was one I found whose "children" were born in the 16th Century while he himself was born in the 19th Century. Ummmm....yeah.

Anyway, I had entered a whole bunch of information, then sadly had to go back and delete it all. But it was fun being related to royalty for a while.

I'll use actual source hints (like census, etc), but after I screwed up a whole line by importing a tree that had a man married to his own mother (by my records) and all of his brothers and sisters his children. Some of them were born BEFORE him...and the others were all born before he was 10 years old.

Can I keep my tree private when I upload it to Ancestry?
Yes. When you upload your tree, you have the choice of creating a public tree or a private tree. If you choose to keep your tree private, Ancestry members can still see names, birth dates, and birthplaces from your tree in search results.

If other people can still see all your data, how is this "private"? This is what keeps me from upgrading. You MUST upload your database in order to produce a book (not required in earlier versions). If they offered a truly PRIVATE feature where none of one's information can be seen, then it would be more attractive. When I first purchased FTM, it was owned by Broderbund. It is possible to produce a book or other reports without uploading to their website.

FTM is now owned by Ancestry.com which is owned by the Mormons.

apart and sell it as leafs in little bits to your cousins and descendants for all eternity. That has kept me from freely sending my tree on to my family on FTM. But I've decided to risk that one of somebody will give the tree away to ancestry in order that some family will currently have access to the 4 boxes of data I input into FTM. We are just at the point where we don't know each other anymore, 3rd and 4th cousins. I have the address of I think at least one member from each branch. It is now or never. Doubt when those four boxes of material make it to the Canadian Archives that anyone will find them. Better to disseminate it on FTM dvd now. So we have control over it for a little bit.

I don't care to widely distribute the results of my research. I'm going to do 4 books. One for my daughter, one for my sister who lives in Australia and has kids, one for my local library and one for the Seattle Public Library. The information I found in the US I worked for -- trips, many many Saturdays at the library, lots of letters and checks to vital statistics and other libraries, etc., before computers. But once I had a connection across the Atlantic, I used the research of others. I figure if i could find it, my unknown relatives can too. I've run a sample book on FTM and it's over 1,100 pages. So, double-sided, still a huge book. I may have to figure out how to separate families (although in the 1300's and 1400's there were lots of intermarriages) to make smaller books.

My question is how do I know when to stop?

I have a line of ancestors in London, Ontario. I went there for a family reunion some years ago. One of them was working on the family tree and we connected in 1830. I saw the old family homestead. Nice bunch of people; I had a great time.

'published' up to each individual. My information is in no way book ready and I am not a writer.

That's why your data can flow between the two.

As I posted on this thread in the Lounge, you can make a GEDCOM in Ancestry for transfer to another genealogy app. I use Ancestry at work (if it's slow), then when I'm home I'll enter the new data into my home app.

I was nervous because sometimes their software is quirky and I was concerned whether I could transfer over 12 years of research to the new software. I'd switched computers and though I had the tree backed up, I couldn't find my Version 16 software.

Amazon had very mixed reviews about 2012 version, but so far I've found it to be the best version I've dealt with so far. To be on the safe side, I didn't set it to automatically sync to Ancestry.com, as that seemed to be where people had the most problems.

That way I can do a backup first and manually sync it when I want to. I really didn't like the idea of Ancestry automatically communicating with my tree anyway. I haven't tried yet though, still a little apprehensive.