Hello,
I think my problem is in RM9 but it’s using TreeShare to sync with Ancestry that I found it.
I merged many Citations from many Sources in one unique Source, and I modified the Details of this new Source.
In RM9, everything looks OK but when I sync any Citations to Ancestry, after deleting any ones in Ancestry before, the new synced ones always display, for any Citations, the Sources details that this unique Source had before I do the merges!!!
So is there a problem in my RM9 database? I don’t find in Tools one that could help.
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If I understand the post, this issue wasn’t caused by merging records that should not have been merged, rather what is being described is the way Treeshare is designed. When you Treeshare a citation from ancestry to RM, there is a unique “ancestryID” created in a RM Db table. This information is not displayed to the user. The ID contains a combination of the location of the document in the ancestry source catalogue and the specific person being cited in such a way that ancestry knows how to display the citation as an “Ancestry Source”. This table field maintains the integrity between the RM citation and the ancestry citation across future treeshare events. In other words, the citation will appear as an “Ancestry Source” (in exactly the same way that it is displayed before the original treeshare download) when pushed to a new ancestry tree or, as you did, when pushed back up to the same tree. (This holds true when using Memorize/Copy Reuse function as well.) All other rm citations get displayed as “Other Sources” in the ancestry web page.
A consequence of this behavior is that, for any citation created in RM via treeshare, no subsequent edits to any of the RM source or citation fields will be displayed on ancestry after a follow-on treeshare. Ancestry will always display the details of the original ancestry-created citation. A sort-of exception is that, Notes attached to RM Fact (or Event) will appear in the “Other Sources” section of the webpage after a Treshare.
If the goal is to modify a citation treeshared from ancestry such that source/citation edits made in RM will appear in ancestry after a subsequent treeshare, then the link to the “AncestryID” needs to be broken. You can to do this within the RM sw by using the “Memorize / Paste Copy” function. (The design of this function is that the pasted citation is intended to be different from the original and the link to the “ancestryID” is not maintained.) Note that this method requires pasting the new citation everywhere the old citation has been used and then deleting the old citation. I suggest making a backup of your database as the first step. You may even want to make a whole test environment so that you don’t mess up your ancestry tree. (ie make a copy of your db, break the link to your ancestry tree in the new rm copy, and then treeshare a new private tree up to ancestry.). Another option would be to add the edits you want as a Fact note in Rm. As mentioned above, Fact Notes do treeshare up to ancestry as “Other Sources” and will be attached to the Fact in the ancestry web page. (This may have an effect on RM reports if you use the reporting features.)
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Many thanks for this very very interesting comment, and if despite my poor ‘‘French-English’’, I understand it, this means that I would have to delete in Ancestry this Citation from absolutely any people using it?
But you also said that a ‘‘Memorize / Paste Copy’’ will broke the ‘‘AncestryID’’ link. I very use this feature when, for example, I analyze a marriage official document.
So I did a test in creating an all new people in Ancestry using TreeShare (a new father added in RM) with a Citation associated to his Occupation fact. This Citation was already synced to Ancestry associated to the Marriage of one child. It was created in RM for the Marriage, then the father was added and the same Citation was ‘‘Paste Copy’’. But because I don’t need many copies of this same Citation, I choose Reuse, so the ‘‘AncestryID’’ is perhaps not broken? Because when I check the father in Ancestry, the Source details of this Citation are the wrong old ones.
I will do another test with an all new Citation in RM and will check how its Source details sync
Correct. When you “Reuse” a citation, the new citation is linked to the original, and the ‘‘AncestryID’’ is maintained, so the new citation will appear in the “Ancestry Source” part of the web page, exactly like the original citation. Try a test with “Paste Copy” and you should see the results that you are hoping for.
Also, the Marriage fact is perhaps not the best example to test with because it is a family fact in RM but ancestry does not have this concept of a family fact. It’s kind of off-topic to your issue but it might avoid some confusion to test a citation for supporting an individual fact - birth, baptism, death burial, etc.
I also Reuse these Citations with Birth of each Spouse, so I will test with
I just did a test with a new people with a new Citation never used before either in RM or Ancestry. After using Treeshare, in Ancestry the Citation details are OK but the Source details are always and always the wrong ones (the ones of the very very first Citation I synced to Ancestry, before merging all my Citations in this Source and editing its details). Nightmare…
What I don’t understand is that I never synced any Citation and about nothing from Ancestry to RM, Ancestry is only my ‘‘online backup’’ and very useful for hints since they bought Geneanet.org, a major site for French people. The other major French one, Filae, was bought by MyHeritage at the same time.
So I can restart from scratch in Ancestry, but what are the best steps? And now, do my Citations in RM that were previously synced to Ancestry also have an ‘‘AncestryID’’ associated to them?
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Ah! It appears that I misinterpreted your original post. My apologies. I assumed that you had initially treeshared citations from ancestry to rootsmagic. Based on your comment, the citations in question must appear on the ancestry webpage in the “Other sources” section of the page, not in the “Ancestry sources” section (see image below). Is that correct?
Also if you initially created the Source/Citations in Rootsmagic then the Source Template type is probably not “Ancestry Record”. (This type of source template gets used automatically when a new citation is treeshared from Ancestry to Rootsmagic.) And if this is the case, then all of my prior comments about the “ancestryID” field were misleading. Again, my apologies. The “ancestryID” field only gets created when an Ancestry Source/citation is treeshared from Ancestry to Rootsmagic.
I have some additional questions before I can make any suggestions. I want to avoid making the situation worse so apologies in advance if my comments seem overly cautious.
Have you been able to resolve the issue in your RM database that was cause by merging? In your last comment you state that the “Source details are always the wrong ones.” In rootsmagic, data from the source record is shared by all citations that reference that particular source. The problem that you describe (source details being wrong) is a common side effect of mistakes when editing sources and / or merging sources and citations. We should make sure that the problem has been resolved in your RM database as the first step.
If your RM db has source or citation issues that need to be fixed and you have backups of your RM db then restoring a recent backup from before you did the merging may be the cleanest way forward. Also, if you don’t already do so, I suggest enabling the feature that prompts you to backup your RM database before exiting (Settings, Program Settings, Ask for backup). When exiting RM, if you choose the option to ‘backup without media’, then the backup file is quite small and you can backup your db often. This makes it less painful to recover from the mistakes that we all make. (You’ll need a separate backup strategy for your media files.) Finally, always restore to another directory or make a copy of your database prior to restoring to avoid overwriting your current db.
When it comes to the ancestry side, you’ll want to consider your hints as you decide how to proceed. If you restart Ancestry from scratch, then all of your hints will come back as “New”. The primary decision may be whether it’s more work to manually delete the problem citations in ancestry and then treeshare the citation changes once they have been fixed in RM or start a new ancestry tree and have to deal with re-processing all of hints that you’ve already processed.
This is a long way around to answering your question of “what are the best steps”. I expanded on the steps to establish a test environment below. If you decide to manually fix your current ancestry tree then these steps will establish a new test environment for you where you can see how things will work without impacting your main RM database or ancestry tree.
If you decide that you want to create a new ancestry tree and deal with the new hints, then follow the steps below but change step 1 to rename your current db to be the test db and name the new db copy as your “master db”. This approach turns your current RM Db and Ancestry tree into your test environment and the new db and tree become your master.
Steps to establish a test environment:
- Make a copy of your db (I just call mine “Test - <date>”).
- Go to Settings, Webhint Settings (the lightbulb icon), and select “Disconnect from Ancestry Tree”
- Publish your test tree to ancestry using Treeshare (mark this test tree private in ancestry settings)
Note that the “Disconnect” step is irreversible, so always do a backup before disconnecting your db from ancestry. (The ancestry connection is saved in the backup and will be reconnected if you restore the db from backup.)
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Yes, you are right, in Ancestry they are in ‘‘Other sources’’ and none in ‘‘Ancestry sources’’
OK, and absolutely logical
I fully agree with you, but I don’t know how to check this in RM. I discovered it after doing some sync to Ancestry and, I don’t remember why, opening a Citations. Restarting from a backup (they are done each time I quit RM that’s at least one per day, no media by default) would be very hard work because I will loss dozens of Citations and their media and hundreds of links…
So you are right, and it was the beginning of my post: is the problem in my RM db or a Treeshare one ?
Source details of Marriages in city Arbois, now it contains any dates.
Before the merges, I started doing one Source for each marriages archives book, but this was creating too many sources so I merged all theses sources in only one by fact type by city.
Now in Ancestry, any Source details are always these:
The Title / Note / REFN are the ones of the Source I decided to use when starting the merges because it was those containing the most Citations.
So, at this time, and if we are 200% sure that my RB db is clean, I prefer restarting with an all new tree in Ancestry because by now I didn’t work on many hints, only understanding how they will help me in a next step. My tree was first built using many printed family archives, and for now I’m first validating any facts of all people with adding as many Citations as possible, each of them with the permalink and the media taken from the official archives books/websites
Thanks for your explanation of the edits and merges that you’ve done. It is very helpful. Here are some things to check in your RM database before pushing up a new ancestry tree. You probably will want to review the same areas in each of the city sources that you’ve created.
The screenshot of the Arbois Source section shows 23 webtags associated with the source and that the source has been used 694 times.
Every citation will have those 23 webtags. A high number of webtags is often a result of merging sources. I’d click on the WebTags chevron and confirm that each webtag is applicable to every Arbois marriage citation. I guess this might makes sense if there are 23 marriage archive books and you want to have the entire list of them available for every citation. However, it may be the case that some of the webtags are duplicates, don’t belong to this source, or should become citation webtags.
The next thing I’d check is to make sure that the citations are associated with the correct source. Since you merged by city, things may be just fine. Based on the source template you shared, you could try an advanced search like below to see if any mismatches get identified between the marriage event location and the marriage source archive location. (You may need to change Marriage Place to Place Details if you store the city in the place details field.)
If this search identifies issues you would need to use the “Go To” button to review each person’s marriage event, along with any other events for that person where the citation has been used. (You could also create a group using the same criteria and then filter the ‘People’ view to display only that group if that’s easier to work with.)
As an aside, I find editing sources and citations from within the people view much easier with slide in workflow enabled. (Settings, General Settings)
If for some reason advanced Search does not work for you, you might at least spot check a few citations. (You can click on the Citation “use” field to see the person and fact that the citation was applied to. The source “use” field works in the same way.)
Also, if you merged citations, you will want to spot check citations and look at the webtag and media fields values. Any value with a high count should be checked as it could indicate unexpected merge results.
Finally, here’s an update of the steps to link your RM db to a new ancestry tree once you are ready to do so:
- Make a backup of your rm db
- Go to Settings, Webhint Settings (the lightbulb icon), and select “Disconnect from Ancestry Tree”
- “Publish” your RM db using Ancestry Treeshare. You should now be presented with the screens to upload your RM db to a new ancestry tree.
- Your old ancestry tree will remain unless you delete it from within Ancestry (Tree Settings).
Note that the “Disconnect” step (step 2) is irreversible. If you need to reconnect your RM db to the old ancestry tree for some reason, you would need to restore the RM db from the backup in step 1.
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You are right, these 23 WebTags are the 23 marriage archive books I opened until now. None were existing in the merged Sources, I add them manually and a few ones are missing. Unfortunately in RM Edit WebTags page, we cannot resize the columns - idea for a new release? - so the first one doesn’t show many data.
I already use such an Advanced Search to add Citations to not proven Marriages. In Place details, I only enter street addresses. I will do your enhanced search too.
It was unchecked, and I will try with. Many thanks for the tip.
Before opening this discussion here, I already did such checks each time I discovered more and more wrong Source details on Ancestry. Only Marriage ones are wrong, those from my Birth, Death and Census Archives are OK, but no other sources were merged in these ones.
I will try this, and I will keep you informed of the result. I understood that I will loss any Webhints but I prefer (re)starting with a well-configured platform before adding more and more Citations to this Arbois, Marriages Source.
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I did an all new TreeShare with Ancestry and… everything seems OK 
Existing Marriage Citations, new ones synced, etc. With a refresh button at people level that you could use after editing in RM9 or Ancestry and not leaving TreeShare, and this will become a fantastic tool. I know that this ask was escalated. Plus also deleting Sources, Notes, etc from inside TreeShare.
Many many thanks for your great help, and I learned so many very useful things reading you!
Perhaps the Magic_Guide_TreeShare_Ancestry_FAQ.pdf dated 2017-06-27 could be updated with latest RM9 screenshots? Even if this page https://help.rootsmagic.com/RM9/ancestry-treeshare.html is UpToDate but less rich.
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