I was very pleased to see release 11.4 with its fixes to Treeshare following the introduction of Ancestry’s new API. Having experienced some weird problems since the API changed, I hoped that the new release, with its fix for problems in data transmission from Ancestry, would correct and stabilise things.
So I was disappointed on my first day using the newly released software to see another small problem.
Adding some people from Ancestry to RM as usual, I noticed that I had made a mistake in Ancestry; I had added a new person and her husband, but had added his surname as Mallett, in fact her surname, rather than Munro, his correct surname. So, after processing the other changes, I went back into Ancestry and corrected his name.
I then ran treeshare. (I have now done so twice.) But I still get the previous record with the wrong surname
I think I know that Ancestry only sends new data for people who have changed since the process was last run, so my guess is that it has somehow failed to detect that I had changed anything. I suspect that I could fix this by running ‘re-set treeshare,’ which refreshes all the Ancestry data anew, but from experience I know that the subsequent update will take an hour or two to run.
In the end I fixed the problem by making a further change to his profile in Ancestry, which it did pick up, but clearly there are still some small teething problems.
It certainly looks as if this problem (like another problem in which a change in Ancestry was not detected) was at Ancestry’s end, but without knowing all the technical details, it is hard to be sure.
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I have manually added sources and media not showing on the changed list, but I cannot recreate this issue with the change to the primary name. It will place them on the changed list when changes have been made on either side.
I wondered whether the issue has something to do with timing. In this case and another where a change in Ancestry was not picked up, I made the change while treeshare was still open. This shouldn’t matter; Ancestry should send a record for any person changed since it last sent a record to RM, not since treeshare was last closed. (And it probably wouldn’t know when treeshare was last closed.)
Wondering about this, I tried a couple of little experiments, changing his name back to the mistaken one, running treeshare, and while treeshare was still open and without having accepted the changes, altering his name back, closing and re-running treeshare. And secondly adding a new person (a son to this couple) with a wrong surname, running treeshare and without having accepted the changes, altering this person’s name in Ancestry, closing and re-running treeshare.
I couldn’t replicate the previous issue in either case; both changed records appeared properly in treeshare, so there is no evidence to support my timing hunch. However, when I added the new son to the couple, both parents were obviously marked as changed, and in the process I spotted something else I had previously not noticed; I must have altered the wife’s profile at the same time as changing the husband’s name (adding a more detailed date of birth than originally). Only when I added her invented son did this change flow through to treeshare. So originally, it had missed two changes to the same couple, the wife’s date of birth and the husband’s primary surname.
