I am brand new to RootsMagic (using v.8) and my tree on ancestry.com needs a major clean-up. I have decided to start with me and just include my direct line of grandparents/ancestors instead of including all their siblings and their progeny. Additionally, I made the rookie mistake of including information from other members’ trees and there are a lot of errors that need fixing - hence my back to basics approach. I will go back and fill out the great aunts and uncles et al once I have an accurate base. My question is this - should I do this in RootsMagic first and then treeshare when I am done or should I do it in ancestry first and then share that into Rootsmagic? Of course, I don’t even know how to do either of those things yet, but first things first. I will watch videos and read handouts when I am at that point. I appreciate your help in answering this question first so I know how best to start. If you think I should clean this up differently, please feel free to say what has worked for you and/or point me in the right direction for videos or handouts that will help me once I am ready to move on. Thanks so much.
Best to use software and database on your computer as the master source and upload to ancestry. This keeps your data more under your control. However you are starting from ancestry and RM8 is still pretty rough with bugs so perhaps cleaning up in Ancestry is a good option.
I think you’ll find that editing is much easier in RM. Also, Ancestry won’t be the source of all of your data and RM is definitely easier when adding non Ancestry sources. So I suggest diving in with RM8, making it your master db and doing edits there. It’s true that some folks are experiencing issues but from what we can see in the forums, the vast majority of folks having issues are long time RM users with very large databases.
There’s several nuances on the best way to proceed, mostly based on what you want your ancestry tree to look like going forward. Assuming you used treeshare to import to RM8 directly. That’s good. Here’s an approach that I think will work well.
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Do a drag and drop of the folks you want to a new RM db. (Research in this forum about potential drag and drop transfer losses. Am pretty sure that if you have a new RM db you should be fine.)
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Then do an immediate treeshare push with no media to a new Ancestry db. Mark the Ancestry tree private. The purpose of this db is for you to see how ancestry sources that have been imported via treeshare push back up to ancestry. You should find that the sources look like your original ancestry tree with all of the ancestry media present.
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Start editing your RM db and push edits to you new ancestry tree via treeshare. Backup your new RM db on every exit.
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Assess your go forward plan. If you like this approach you can make your ancestry tree public and just keep going. If not, this becomes a test db and you adjust as needed.
The initial treeshare upload/download is a “full synch”. Subsequent treeshare upload/downloads are done on a fact by fact basis. You will either love that or hate it. This plus your goal for your ancestry tree will drive your go-forward plan. For example, if you use ancestry for your own personal research only, you may decide to treeshare in both directions, treeshare data down to RM only and not worry about keeping ancestry updated, or to add data to your rm tree manually and treeshare back up to ancestry in order to keep things in synch. If your goal is to share a tree on ancestry that looks like an original ancestry tree and you find that treesharing each fact is too much work, you may decide to treeshare from ancestry to RM and then periodically push a copy of your tree up to ancestry as series of 1x pushes. This will produce an ancestry tree that looks to others like it was built on ancestry. Net, there is no right or wrong way, it’s just a matter of what works best for you.