I’m brand new to RootsMagic, but have been researching my ancestors for many years. I’ve been watching a few videos and will continue to do so but don’t see this question covered. Do I need to type in all of my ancestors or can I download my tree from Ancestry. Will that automatically populate what I would have to type in? Thanks.
Hi,
Have a look in the online help.
Should help with what you need to do
Den
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The short answer is “yes”. The online help referenced above should be about all you need.
There are two things to be aware of after the download is complete.
- Assuming your Ancestry tree has images connected as sources, they will be downloaded to RM along with everything else. This is a good thing. The images will all be in one big folder and they will all have meaningless file names. From the point of view of using the files from RM, that doesn’t matter because RM knows where they are and what they are called. You can click on them from RM to look at them just fine and RM will open the correct file just fine. You can look at the files from Windows File Explorer or from Finder on a Mac. But you won’t know which file is which because of the meaningless file names. To look at the files properly, you will need to do so from within RM.
- After the download is complete, your RM database and your Ancestry tree will be in sync. Thereafter, you will have to decide if you are going to work in RM or in Ancestry or in both. No matter which way you do it, your RM and your Ancestry will not stay in sync automatically. TreeShare provides some tools to help you keep them in sync manually, but it’s a manual process rather than an automatic process. Also, it’s possible that after the download is complete, you may not need your RM and your Ancestry to stay in sync. So there are a lot of decisions to make.
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