Another small treeshare problem

I almost always update Rootsmagic from Ancestry. rather than the other way around. One exception is when tidying up inconsistent places. In this case the easiest thing to do is to identify the place names to be changed, create a group for the people with affected events, update the places in RM and then use treeshare (filtering on the group) to update Ancestry.

I have just been doing this, successfully, for a group of people, when I came across this one which has refused to update.

I then click to update Ancestry from RM,

Then click to accept changes. Everything proceeds normally, with the usual ‘collecting changes’ screen and no error message, but in the end the change has not been applied

And sure enough, in Ancestry, the ‘county’ that I was trying to remove is still there.

I have now done this five or six times, each time with the same results.

The place name was easily corrected in Ancestry

And of course then appears correctly in treeshare

I had 40 people to update in this way in this group and this was the only person with a problem. I have not seen this previously.

This is the latest small issue that I have come across with treeshare after the implementation of the new API. The only things that they have in common are that they are all weird, apparently inconsistent and not repeatable. I don’t quite know what to make of them.

1 Like

I have just had the same problem, an update not being made in Ancestry, on another person tidying up a different set of place inconsistencies. It was one of more than 40 people in the list. Again there was no error message but the update failed repeatedly. The data was easily changed in Ancestry.

And another issue.

In going through the above process of standardising place names, I knew that the changes I made in RM via the Places screen would not trigger changes that would show as changed in Ancestry, but I expected that the changes I made from Treeshare to Ancestry would.

When I went back into Treeshare and filtered on changed people, none of them showed up. Perhaps Ancestry is being very smart and figured out that people only changed in Ancestry via Treeshare should not again show up as changed when returning to Treeshare. If so, that would be a small improvement, cutting out people to clear from the screen.

However, in the process of making these changes I also noticed one person for whom I had a marriage event, but had not identified whom she had married. On digging around, I did identify her spouse, her married name and details of her death. I added all of these to Ancestry.

But on returning to Treeshare, only the spouse appeared as changed, and not the original person

Navigating to her, she has indeed been changed, but she was not marked as such.

This is clearly a bug, most likely on the Ancestry side, although without knowing what goes on under the hood, it is hard to be sure.

On the second screenshot you had unticked the ‘only show changed people’ box and when you selected Gertrude it showed the changes to her profile. Did it then successfully update RM when you selected the changes from there? If so definitely an Ancestry issue I suspect. It seem to me that the whole new API change was extremely rushed for some reason.

I had one similar – I believe the reasons were because of a “complex” family relationship – children from diff bio parents but all shared bio mom, I had 2 parent sent noting adoption etc. The person who failed to update via treeshare was the father adoption he was bio dad to 3 but not the 1st bio dau of the couple . What worked was to add him on ancestry then link back to RM then fix facts etc. Not sure if API 2.0 is at fault or RM. I was going to test that when I have time and I could also test in FTM to see if both fail etc

Yes it did update successfully. However, I do not see how that establishes that the problem definitely rests with Ancestry.

As TreeShare is controlled by an API that is (I understand) created by Ancestry and that it failed to identify an individual who had several changes made in Ancestry, I assume that it is an issue with their TreeShare program. Always happy to be proved wrong however!

I think you misunderstand what the API does and does not do. The API allows RM to establish communications with Ancestry and to trigger certain standard processes, probably implemented as database procedures at Ancestry’s end. These processes include all the things that you can see, logging in and out, creating a new tree, downloading a whole tree, checking linked Ancestry and RM trees processing deletes, inserts, updates and amends of people and events in either direction between the two trees.

The API does not run the comparison of the two sets of data, produce the screens that we see, managing the filtering by groups or whatever or handle the processes through which we users decide which events to trigger; all this is run by software written by RM.

It is fairly likely that Ancestry failed to send a flag showing that the person concerned had been changed, but it is also possible that RM misinterpreted data sent by Ancestry. Without knowing exactly how this process works, it is hard to be sure.

In this case, the situation was unusually complex. I ran a comparison between RM and Ancestry at a certain time. I then used Treeshare to update lots of place names on Ancestry. These changes would have triggered a new ‘last edited date/time’ on Ancestry or whatever the relevant data that they hold is. However, you don’t want all the changes that you make via Treeshare to show up as changes that you have to clear from treeshare when you next log in. So of the 40 changes that I made, 39 were properly filtered out. In the 40th case, I made an update via Treeshare, noticed something missing in Ancestry, investigated and made further changes there. So this person was changed both via treeshare (which should have been filtered out) and directly in Ancestry (which should not have been). I don’t know enough about how the processes are supposed to work to know what the two pieces of software should have done or which was at fault.

2 Likes

Well in theory – there is software to track the API calls/traffic behind the scenes but even then you would have to make sense of it afterwards (put into context etc) The bottom line even a knowledgeable might misunderstand what is going on or is expected (or not).

I’m not so sure about this assertion.
Software MacKiev’s Family Tree Maker offers seamless synching (via licensing) and it seems, more likely than not, that the API is designed to facilitate Ancestry being able to insure against corruption via some form of comparison. Just saying.

1 Like

The clue is in the name. API = Application Programming Interface. It manages the interface with the application, Ancestry. That’s all. Treeshare was developed by RM.

Many things make use of API – Ancestry set the paramters what API can and can not do – likely mainly to worth primary with FTM. RM has to create an interface that worked via treeshare with the RM database and Ancestry side. I have used API calls with Power Bi for things like economic data so I have a limited understanding.

1 Like

I believe that I have the same problem. Changes made to sources, facts and media in RM will not upload via TreeShare to Ancestry. Interestingly, this only occurs for one particular person and only in the RM-to-Ancestry direction. Changes made in Ancestry will download to RM via TreeShare for this particular person.

What would happen if I unlinked this person from Ancestry (with the TreeShare option)? Could I then re-link them? Might that be a fix?

not sure if this will work for you – when I had that happen before – I link them on Ancestry side to spouse/children – then link them from ANC to the RM person – then made sure everything was linked not missing etc

I initially opened this topic noting occasions on which treeshare did not update a person’s details in Ancestry, and then added another issue in which treeshare did not notice that a person’s Ancestry profile had been changed.

I had intended to add a small update to say that both of these problems continue to recur, in a minority of cases, although enough for me to notice them every couple of days or so.

And now, today, I have a new issue, or more exactly a combination of the two.

The sole case in which I update Ancestry from RM is if I have used RM’s places management tools to correct a place name in such a way as it has a bulk impact. I first mark all the people to be affected with a group, then change the place, then update Ancestry via Treeshare. In this case, I was updating some instances of ‘British Columbia’ to read ‘British Columbia, Canada’. I had already had one case where the change had not been applied in Ancestry, and I had done it manually. Then this person appeared to have the same problem

After accepting changes and watching treeshare collect changes from Ancestry, I was left, as you can see, with the impression that the change had not been applied.

But this time, when I went to Ancestry, it had

So, although RM had updated Ancestry and been busy collecting changes from Ancestry, the change in Ancestry didn’t find its way back to RM. This is the first time I have noticed this particular issue, although, as I say, I don’t update Ancestry from RM very often.

If you closed TreeShare and reopened does it show the correct change?

Not having the changed list update everyone when the Place name is globally changed is intentional. Development changed it after TreeShare was initially released in RM 7.5. It caused delays working in the place list.

1 Like

No. It appears just as before. No doubt I could force a change by altering something else or use ‘reset treeshare.’

As an aside, this was one of a large number of similar changes that I was pushing through to Ancestry. I estimate that 90-95% worked properly, a small number would not update and two, (including the example shown here) did update but the change made in Ancestry was not reflected in Treeshare.

While going through the list, I also came across a fair few people whose profiles I had changed on Ancestry but who had not previously been marked in Treeshare. When I first came across a few of these after starting to use RM11/the new API, I guessed that they had all been missed when I first installed RM11 and used the new API, but increasingly I think that some have been missed subsequently.

I understand this. I think that you subsequently recommended marking the people concerned with a group before making the change in RM and then using the group to highlight the people with changes to be reflected in Ancestry. I have been using that approach with some success.

Have you used Reset TreeShare after updating to RM 11.4.0. That should make a difference.

I had not run it until reading your post, but I have now. I hesitate to run it very often as I know that treeshare will take a long time to run. (It just took about three hours.)

Of course Beatrice Mabel Faulkes appears properly now. I would have been astonished if she hadn’t, since the whole point of reset treeshare as I understand it is to have Ancestry refresh all the data.

I will see whether I continue to have similar problems in future.

Unfortunately, I have already encountered some more problems.

I have just been working on the family of George Reginald Beare.

I added him in the 1926 Irish Census (a new source and a new residence record not visible here) and a source for him in the Fitzpatrick biographical index of physicians. And I added two children, sourced to the Biographical index and to the Ireland Births index which also mentions the mother’s maiden name (added to her profile as a source).

But when I went into Treeshare (which I have since run several times), none of these people appeared as changed

And when I went to George Reginald Beare, literally none of this appeared.

There were no new sources to add to his wife, and the children are not there at all.

So I closed treeshare, made another change to his profile (some random text in the detail for his death) and re-ran treeshare.

Now I could see him in the list of changed people and the census entry appeared. There were also two rather odd lines where his children ought to have been, without the children actually being there.

I then tried to force the children to appear by amending the details of their births. Nothing changed.

So I added a fictional spouse to one of them.

He and his spouse then appeared.

Adding a fictional spouse to the second child caused him to appear too.

It all seems rather unreliable. I noticed these because I had only changed these few people a few minutes before running treeshare, but I often do a large lot in bulk and would probably not notice a few missing changes. (I have checked and after processing these changes, I do have the name number of people in Ancestry and RM.)