Ancestry Sources and TreeShare

RootsMagic
1

After some more experimenting with Ancestry sources and TreeShare (RM10.0.5.0), these would be my feature requests for handling ancestry sources on TreeShare.

  1. Fix the auto fill of citation details when uploading an ancestry source from RM to Ancestry. This could be an Ancestry problem, or some deviation in the Ancestry API that broke it.
  2. An option to NOT download all of the ancestry media attached to ancestry sources, as this can be enormous. I’m sure this has been oft requested.
  3. Make it safe to merge all citation duplicates after download. I have my own SQLite fix to just paste the “anID” from the AncestryTable into one of the citation fields of the CitationTable after download. Then merge, which gets rid of all the duplicates that RM creates for the same exact ancestry record. The unique “anID” prevents merges of actual records.

I’m not asking to preserve custom edits of ancestry sources on download/upload as I decided to just convert anything I want to modify to regular non-ancestry sources. For those remaining ancestry sources, you get ancestry’s latest autofill on download (and upload when fixed).

Long explanation of what I found…

Ancestry Sources (background)
o When you attach an ancestry record to a person/fact on Ancestry.com, it automatically fills out the source and citation information (or not) which you can see by clicking on the record and then on “Citation Details”
o Periodically ancestry will modify the autofill of this information for the same record (hopefully for the better). You can observe this change when you disconnect the record and then connect it again. For example, the beginning of a citation for a US 1950 Census record might change from the older “United States of ..” to the newer “National Archives at..” or the actual name of the source could change for from “Vermont, Marriage Records, 1909-2008” to “Vermont, U.S., Marriage Records, 1909-2008”. I’ll call this process of a complete auto refill on disconnect->connect a “reconnect”.
o All the fields of the citation details section (citation, source, repository) can be edited and completely customized by the user. Call this a “custom edit”. If you reconnect the record, it will get wiped out and auto filled by Ancestry to their latest “autofill” for that record.

Ancestry Source Downloads to Rootsmagic (via TreeShare)
o All the ancestry source downloads to RM will show up in the SQLite “AncestryTable” with LinkType=4 where “anID” in the table is the Ancestry record id.
o On download via TreeShare, the citation/source in RM behaves exactly like a “reconnect” so custom edits or an older autofill won’t show up, and you will get the latest ancestry autofill showing up for the source/citation on the RM side.
o A given ancestry record for a given person on ancestry can point to several facts/events of that person (name, birth, residence…etc..), but for whatever reason RM will create a separate citation from this one record for every fact that is connected.

Ancestry Source Uploads to Ancestry (via TreeShare)
o I believe the intent on upload is to also “reconnect” thereby getting the latest ancestry autofill for the record. It doesn’t take any citation/source edits that may have been done on RM side, in other words it probably doesn’t look at the citation table at all on upload and just uses the AncestryTable to reconnect. This could be one method of getting all ancestry records in a tree to the latest ancestry autofill. Currently this appears to be broken and the enter citation detail section is blank. Hopefully this gets fixed.
o If the blank source is reconnected on ancestry, it will get auto filled again.
o If the blank source is downloaded to a new RM tree via TreeShare it will also get auto filled into the RM tree.
o When uploading ancestry sources from RM to ancestry, it does NOT duplicate all records that are attached to marriages for each person on ancestry (it maintains the original connection). This is a nice attribute of TreeShare vs others.

1 Like
2

There is no concept of reconnecting. The action is to either upload/download a new source to the opposite side. (Maybe that’s what you mean?) You can overwrite facts but you cannot overwrite a source. Deleting of a source in done outside of TreeShare. You could delete the fact and replace it with a new one so the source you want shows. Remembering to delete the unused citation on the Sources page afterwards.

When sharing sources you must select each fact it applies to before clicking “Accept changes”. That will send just the one source linked to each fact. If you are updating the fact individually and click “Accept changes” on each it won’t see them as using the same source.

In update 10.0.4 we no longer merge dupliate citations wtih blank citation name and fields. You will need to manually merge those, after confirming they don’t contain unrelated media and webtags.

3

The thing I find most aggravating with TreeShare is that when I “Reuse citation” in RM10 for multiple facts, it appears that Ancestry TreeShare duplicates the citation. Is there any way to stop this behavior? I do go fact by fact and look at the sources when updating both databases.

4

They only way to stop it duplicating is to add all the facts at the same time. Check each fact before clicking “Accept Changes”.

5

Good to know. Not very intuitive. Thanks.