I have been away from RM9 for 3 weeks but have been working on Ancestry during that period. Today I opened up Treeshare to download my recent Ancestry work, and encountered the following -
For some reason Ancestry has either ignored the “Only changed records” flag, as it looked like my whole tree was showing (14,000). I also realised that this gave me an opportunity to correct many differences that I knew Treeshare ignored (following item).
For some unknown reason when Treeshare was originally designed, one of the consistent errors I get is in regard to how it handles Marriages. The most common one is that an many cases Treeshare completely ignores Marriage Facts/Events, and this was proven to me with today’s Treeshare issue.
More than 10% of all the “Changed” facts was that Ancestry now showed a Marriage fact which it had previously ignored. Most of these were for couples I had added (in Ancestry) years ago, which included a Marriage fact and attached record.
I could have easily fixed this issue by downloading my Tree into a new DB and deleted the old one, but I also noticed many other inconsistencies which I was now able to correct.
I would have attached a Screenshot but can’t see how I can do this?
Has anyone else experienced this issue with Treeshare recently?
Yes, it has been noted by several posters recently that TreeShare has come up with all people not just the recently changed. Ancestry has been doing quite a bit of updates lately. When I next logged in to my tree at Ancestry, I was greeted by an update message and the ability to right click on anyone in my tree for menu options. There will be more changes coming, some related to the ProTools and DNA Matches as Ancestry announced at RootsTech. My solution was to search the TreeShare list for the family I knew I was working on to update, scan the list for unlinked people, then use the option to clear the list of all changed. But I admit, it does not matter to me if my online tree is an exact match to my RM database.
Do the screenshot. There is fancy software with lots of options to make screenshots (usually not free). But Windows alone has a very basic screenshot feature without using any additional software. I assume that a Mac also has a screen shot feature that is built in. With Windows, it usually works with the PrtSc key (Print Screen) or via Windows Key + Shift + S. This will place the screenshot on the Windows clipboard.
Open a graphics program (Microsoft Paint is sufficient on Windows), paste the clipboard into the image (for example using Ctrl + V), and save the image to a file (usually to a JPG file).
In this forum, click the Upload icon (seventh from the left) in the message window you are editing and select the file you made in step #2 to be uploaded.
For some users, steps #2 and #3 might be the hardest because they involve files and folders. It would be nice if the forum software supported pasting from the clipboard directly into the message you were composing. But it doesn’t work that way.
If you’re a Windows PC user, the easiest way to do a screenshot is
Windows Key (next to the CTRL) Shift - S.
Then you can select the area you want to screenshot. It usually saves it to your clipboard and also to the Screenshots folder in the Pictures library. I hope this helps. Please let me know if this is what you’re needing to do and if it works for you.
If you are a Mac user:
How to take a screenshot on your Mac. To take a screenshot, press and hold these three keys together: Shift, Command, and 3 . If you see a thumbnail in the corner of your screen, click it to edit the screenshot.
Sorry maybe I am not understanding what you are saying here BUT if you use
Windows Key + Shift + S. , you can PASTE the image directly into the message by right clicking…
BUT HERE IS MY PROBLEM–there is all this empty space between the photo and my next sentence in the final product BUT not in the message I am typing–
here is a screenshot of the message…
Wow, it does work just to paste into the forum without making a file. I have tried before without success, but I tried again just now and it works. Much thanks for the tip.
Here follows a copy and paste of your previous message, and I never made a file at all. This very much proves that it works without making a file.
Thanks for the update. I was definitely not aware of these changes, either from any messages from Ancestry or finding any related issues on this forum, despite my looking, (maybe there is on RM’s Facebook page, which I never use).
So, is this a temporary problem? If not, it may well negate the benefits of using Treeshare, which is a great feature of RM/Ancestry.
Thanks all for the advice given on adding attachments. I had no problem creating a screenshot or modifying it in Photoshop but came to a dead halt when trying to attach it as part of my message. I completely missed the Upload icon. doh!
On Mac screenshots are created using the OS screenshot tool and saved in the file format and location specified in the options. ie Shift-Command-4 and select an area or Spacebar and click to capture the entire window you are in. No need for pasting from the clipboard to some graphics program.
I’ve been pasting copied screenclips into Community posts with Windows for a year or two. I thought maybe I’d only ever tried drag’n’drop before and had missed this convenient feature. Maybe it always had the capability and I hadn’t tried because the old Forums platform only supported links to image hosts.
Further to my point 2 at the beginning of this post, I am still adding 100’s of Marriage facts that Treeshare failed to include in previous Treeshare syncs. Today I noted that a new family (not in RM yet) was added to RM which included a spouse and a Marriage fact. When I closed Treeshare I then opened this family details, and not surprisingly there was no Marriage fact for either spouse.
What is going on with Treeshare that causes this to happen in so many cases (not all additions to RM have this issue), and why has no one else noticed this?
My research methodology maybe different to others, but I do all my research within Ancestry and then sync this to RM through Treeshare. I then run many of the various checking tools in RM and then sync again to Ancestry to update any adjustments/errors that the tools found.
@russhart --In your first post, you said Most of these marriages were for couples I had added (in Ancestry) years ago–so if you can think back to years ago, when you added a marriage to a person did Ancestry automatically add it to the spouse or did you have to then enter the marriage fact again to the spouse?
There is a fundamental problem with the way that Treeshare deals with marriages. If you transfer a wife and a husband to RM from Ancestry, then RM recognises them as husband and wife but it does lot automatically load the marriage event; you have to do that as a separate operation.
The problem is that, if both husband and wife are new to Ancestry, they will both have been marked as ‘not changed’ the moment they are transferred, and you never get the opportunity to add their marriage. There are various options in treeshare which are supposed to help you do to this, but to cut a long story short, they do not work.
I try to be careful to load marriages manually, as follows
If the couple both already existed and only the marriage event is new, then you should have no problem.
If one of the couple already existed, then add the new person first; when you return to the record for the existing person, you will be able to add the marriage
If neither of these exists, but you are adding people in a new family with a new surname, then add the family members, click to view everyone (not just those with changes) and browse through the members of the new family in alphabetical order adding spouses and marriages as need be.
If this is not practical (eg you already have thousands of people with the same surname) then manage the marriages individually; add the couple, noting the name of at least one of them; click to view everybody (not just those with changes) and navigate to the person concerned to add the marriage. (This used to be much easier in RM7; you could position the cursor on the person concerned, untick the check box and process the spouse and marriage; but RM9 does not keep the highlight on the person concerned making the whole process much more difficult.)
I then do a double check. The best way I have found to do this is to create a criterion group which I call recently changed. This has a sole criterion Date edited is after ddmmyy. I update this date to yesterday (or a little earlier if I am checking a few days’ work). I can then go into Treeshare, unclick the only changed people tick box and select this group. It is then a matter of minutes to browse through the entries one after another to check for missing marriages.
As an aside, Treeshare also corrupts data when transferring married couples from RM to Ancestry. In this case, it does load the marriages automatically. It does so separately for both people. The result is that person one gets two marriage entries and person two gets only one.
I have made a number of proposals for improving this situation which I regard as unacceptably bad, but unfortunately there has been no indication that RM plans to do anything about it.
The underlying reason has been frequently explained as difference in the database structures of the Ancestry Tree and RM and the problem of mapping between the two. In RM, a Marriage event is a so-called "family-type " fact, i.e., there is one event record for a pre-defined couple. This is different from most RM fact types for which there is one record per event per person. The Ancestry Tree follows the latter structure for all fact types, including Marriage and that’s what is delivered to RM via Ancestry’s API. RM’s TreeShare has to pair up these individual Marriage events in its downloaded data, find the matching couple in its already existing database and then create the single event record for the couple. There are pitfalls in that translation:
Ancestry allows an indiviual to have a Marriage event without the spouse having one.
A TreeShare update operates on one person at a time so the corresponding Marriage event for the other person may not be available for pairing.
Pairing of A’s individual Marriage events might be problematic even if both are included in a TreeShare download. Does the API even identify person2 in person1’s Marriage event or does TreeShare rely on matching event dates to infer the pairing?
It is certainly true that Ancestry and RM have different data models. That makes things more complicated but is not excuse for leaving an unacceptable situation as it is. I spent most of my career automating interfaces between different systems which invariably had different data models. You have to be careful, and often can’t automate things 100%, but most situations can be improved.
Here are some simple ideas
Revert to the way that RM 7 operated in which you could see a list of people whose data had changed, highlight a person of interest and click to show all people (regardless of whether their data had changed) with the system retaining the focus on the person concerned. This would allow the user to add that person to RM, to add his/her spouse, to add their marriage and then to click to select only unchanged people to carry on processing other people. That’s what I did in RM7 and cannot easily do now.
One Treeshare option is to mark people as unchanged when they are added to RM. This could be amended such those for whom a marriage event is present on Ancestry but not present on RM are not marked as unchanged. (You could vary the criteria a little if this is too difficult to do. As an aside here, the option not to mark people as unchanged after they have been added does not currently allow you to process marriages properly and also needs to be fixed, as I have explained in a different post.)
Process the additions of spouses and marriages using a database procedure that allows the user to add both in the interface, but updates the new person to the database first and the marriage event afterwards. (You can see something similar to this already happening in the way that Treeshare allows you to add multiple children of the highlighted person; after you have added one in the interface, the system gives you the option to link the second and subsequent children to the earlier ones even though they are not yet present in the database.)
Construct something like my ‘recently changed’ group on the fly in Treeshare - a group of all the people just added to RM. If you were being especially clever you could select a subset of these, being those who are married, or if you were being even cleverer still you could further check this subset to see whether there was a marriage present in Ancestry and missing from RM. You could then prompt users to review these after doing the rest of their work in Treeshare.
Fixing the problem the other way around, in which Treeshare corrupts a user’s Ancestry tree, might or might not be rather harder, depending on details of how the interface works which I don’t have. I suspect that Treeshare currently triggers something in the API which causes all the data related to a particular person held in a particular view in RM to be sent to Ancestry. As noted above, this currently results in one of the members of a couple having a duplicate marriage event. Two possible ways of dealing with this would be
Creating an alternate view excluding the marriage events, and forcing the system to load the data from that for the first person in a pair, so that the marriage only ever gets loaded from the second person in a pair or
After adding the second person, triggering a separate clean up event to delete the duplicate marriage event.
Working out the most practical way of doing something about this would require information about the how the system works that I don’t have access to. However, years of experience are enough for me to know that almost all situations of this kind can be improved one way or another.
Posts here to the effect that Ancestry and RM have different data models often seem to suggest that this prevents any automation; Treeshare wouldn’t exist if that were the case and nor would most interfaces between most of the world’s IT systems.
As others have noted, if you take care to make sure both individuals are in the RM db before the marriage fact is treeeshared then you will avoid the problem you describe. Perhaps someday there will be a software based solution but, in the meantime, an easy fix is to adjust your workflow when importing families to treeshare the new people first, then their facts.
I am NOT seeing this duplicate marriage event when uploading a new marriage in RM 9 to Ancestry…
I did it 3 different times today-- the first time., I added the marriage to the wife in RM which shared it with both in RM–tree shared it up and it added it to the wife–all of it including his name etc was on her page BUT when I went to the hubby, it just had the date and place of marriage–in order to share it with him, I had to hit edit on his Ancestry page and check her name.
2nd time added the marriage to the hubby in RM 9 and after tree sharing it up, it was added to both
3rd time I again tried adding the marriage to the wife in RM and this time it shared it with both—do NOT know what the difference was between 1 and 3 BUT to be safe just add the marriage in RM to the hubby and it should work…
@russhart I am no expert on tree share BUT from what I am seeing you have to do it kind of like we use to do a long time ago when you imported a gedcom into an existing tree- back then, after importing, the program would give you a list of people who could be automatically merged
( changes in treeshare)–you checked it and accepted-- then it would give you a list of people who needed to be manually merged–check them say yes or no-- then you would have to go down the list line by line looking for duplicates and finally clean up your facts.
So basically what I am saying is that after you accept all in the changed list, you need to go down your list one by one and look to see what items need to be updated that were NOT on the changed list-- I know that with 14,000 people this is going to take a while to do BUT think once you do it all, you should NOT keep coming up with ramdom changes you made years ago.
JUST MAKE SURE YOU HAVE BACKED UP YOUR FILE ( and maybe periodically back it up while doing this) AND MAKE SURE AS YOU ARE GOING DOWN THE LIST AND UPDATING THE FACTS THAT THE ACCEPT CHANGES BUTTON SHOWS UP !!! I t didn’t on one of mine…
As for the new couple in Ancestry that showed up on the change list, you need to add the hubby, then add the wife and then go back to the hubby in the Show everyone list and add the marriage–hit accept and it should be done…
I apologise. I had mis-remembered the nature of the problem. The initial result is not a duplicated marriage event, but corrupt marriage events. Fixing this can create duplicate events.
In my test database I just added two new people, husband and wife, and a marriage event between them.
Of course this arises because of the difference in the two systems’ data models. Personally I don’t object to Ancestry’s model, but I do object to the way it has been implemented; it is outrageous that such such a big company should ever allow corrupt data like this to appear. If a marriage between people a and b is added to person a, then the procedure which updates the database should ensure that it is applied identically to person b.
It is a tough ask to have RM work around Ancestry’s problem to avoid this data corruption. It would need to do something like suppress the marriage event on the first person added and update both people when the second person is added. To work out exactly how to do this one would need some detailed knowledge of the API.
Ancestry has always added a Marriage Fact to both spouses.
I may have misunderstood your question. This comment only relates to when I had a Marriage Event within Ancestry and not uploading this from RM to Ancestry.
