I can download a GEDCOM of what it says is a person’s tree, and open it into a new RM file, but the problem is it asks how many generations of ancestors and how many generations of descendants BUT it’s only the ancestors of that person and the descendants of that person; and I want all the ancestors and all of the ancestors’ descendants.
“Download” from where? If instead you mean Export from RM, check Help for that function. There are options for “everyone in the same tree” and “ancestors of the person (x gens) and their descendants (y gens)”.
As Tom already asked, from where? Depending on the answer to that question, there likely are options that do what you wish. But if it turns out that what you need really is all the ancestors and all the ancestor’s descendants and that that’s the only way to do it, you can usually achieve that effect by using really large numbers. For example, 20 generations of ancestors and 30 generations of their descendants would get me everybody in my database to whom I’m related.
When you select the Ancestors option it will let you also select the ancestors descendants. It will climb up the tree that many number of generations of ancestors. And then go down the tree that many numbers of descendants for each ancestor.
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Ooops. I meant downloading from FamilySearch Family Tree. My work-around is to go up the tree to the earliest ancestor on a line, then download that person into a new database (Angelico_Perrotta_FT) and his or her descendants, and make a GEDCOM from the resulting database (Angelico_Perrotta_FT.ged); then produce another GEDCOM file from my main RootsMagic database (Angelico_Perrotta_RM.ged), selecting the same ancestor and his or her descendants, and then running a Python program that reports all the FSFTID’s from one GEDCOM file that are not in the other. This helps me find broken lines where I added people going up the line but didn’t connect them on FamilyTree to their parents. I also discover cousins added by other FamilySearch users, and RM should add a feature that automatically colors them mauve if until the end-user changes the color after verifying enough about each new person.
The FamilySearch imports are very different than how RM handles ancestors with descendants. FamilySearch references the start person and will only include descendants from them. On Ancestors will will include the children of each ancestor.
At our user meeting, someone came who wanted to use RM. He had a Gedcom file with him at a memory stick. He had
macOS Sequoia version 15.3.1 (24D70) on his laptop. Neither on Essential nor the full version was it possible to load the Gedcom file of 902 people. There were no messages.
I then tried on my Windows 11 with RM 10, latest version. There the Gedkom file came in without any problems. We then took the backup there and loaded it into his Mac. The miracle happened, it came in without any problems now. Understand it whoever can!
Best regards from Norway.
What was there exactly? Did you get to the point where RM was asking for the file name to import. Did the screen flicker? Did RM just seem to freeze?
I’m not a Mac user, but could Finder on the Mac see the GEDCOM file on the memory stick? Could you open the GEDCOM file on the Mac with some sort of text editor? Or for that matter, could Finder on the Mac even see the memory stick?
To add to the response from @thejerrybryan
- If the Mac does ‘see’ the GEDCOM file and its contents try to load the GEDCOM in to TextEdit - the Mac’s own plain text editor.
- If the file can’t be read byTextEdit, or the Mac can’t see the external USB Drive and its contents then the most likely cause would be that the Mac is not ‘happy’ with the formatting of the Drive. Macs can be very picky about the ‘quality’ of Drive’s formatted on other systems and the ususal recommendation for users wanting to use USB Drives on multiple systems is to format the the Drive(s) using the Mac’s own Disk Utility software - For sharing/moving files between Mac and Windows the formats to choose for compatibility are FAT32; or ex-FAT if using larger Drives (more than 32Gb), or for the transfer of large files above 4Gb.
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When RM databases are moved in either direction between a PC and a Mac, you need to run Files > Tools > Rebuild Indexes on the system that received the database.
If you don’t run that tool after moving your database between Windows and a Mac, there may be a subtle problem that you haven’t noticed yet. Namely, the Windows version of RM and the Mac version of RM seem to use a very slightly different collating sequence - the way names and places etc. are sorted. These differences may affect you in Norway because the collating sequence used by RM tries to sort the three extra letters in the Norwegian alphabet as if they were the English letters that they most resemble. Well, actually the problem is there even if all the names and places are all English names and places. So even an English language RM user needs to run the tool after moving a database between Windows and Mac in either direction.
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