Hello,
I am very frustrated when comparing Roots Magic & Ancestry for changes.
For example: I have made changes to about 5 people by adding a fact and source citations. But when I compare them - they do not line up and if I mark it to import because it has a source I want to transfer - then I end up with all these duplications with facts and citations.
Another example: They do line up and are the same fact but when comparing the citations - Roots magic has 2 of the citations and Ancestry has 3 citations (but 2 of these are aleady in Rootsmagic) now it wants to import 3 ciations and then I have even more duplicates.
Is it just me or does anyone else have a mess of duplication between the syncing of the 2? I am almost ready to go back to Family Tree Maker because it synced with no problems - but It has been many years since I used it because I have tried to get used to Rootsmagic.
I also would like to know how people handle all the hints that come up in Ancestry. I have found many of the hints/facts that are in Ancestry I already have in rootsmagic but I am not sure how to get these 2 synced together.
I don’t actually try to sync Ancestry and RM for the kinds of reasons you describe. I know that there are RM users who do sync successfully, so I would rather them answer your sync question.
As to Ancestry’s hints, the only reason I use TreeShare with RM is to get Ancestry’s hints while am using RM. But I enter the data from the hints manually into RM rather than using TreeShare to bring the data down to RM automatically. Since I am not syncing, I periodically disconnect my RM from Ancestry and delete my Ancestry tree. Then I use TreeShare again to upload my entire RM database again and that makes my Ancestry hints work again. It also puts my RM and my Ancestry back in sync at that moment. As you can tell from this description, I only update data in RM and I never update data in my tree on Ancestry except in the sense of periodically deleting my Ancestry tree and uploading all my data again from RM.
If you have used FTM previously (or currently) this might be frustrating.
I switched to RM 3 years ago and I used FTM for 17 years before switching to RM.
Basically I use the same method as @thejerrybryan and for same reasoning
I do most everything manually. I want my media named with my structure and have citations that make sense to me The issues you describe are more related to Ancestry than RM IMHO.
Kevin’s approach with RM and Ancestry is also appropriate to FTM. Best to enter data once in your computer database as the master and then sync only up to ancestry.
Ancestry wants us dependent on their very expensive subscription interface for obvious reasons. It is their business model. It is not in their best interest to make any interface with outside platforms totally seamless. The reason I have RM is so that I “own” my research and am not 100% dependent on any other platform. For me, that meant I needed to shift my mindset to keep from being too frustrated in several areas where the RM-Ancestry sync were making me crazy: I can have family trees on multiple platforms for multiple reasons, but only one is my Master file: RM. Like some of the other posters have already mentioned, at times, this might mean that I delete a tree on one of the paid search platforms and re-load a new one there from my RM file.
(1) I use Ancestry (FamilySearch, FindMyPast, Newspapers.com, etc.) for research and hints; but I now only manually add the source & citation information that I discover in RM. The advantage here is that I can control the format of my sources, citations, and repositories. I find that in many cases, Ancestry’s citations are woefully lacking since their business model just wants to refer you back to their website. The FamilySearch sync is more clunky than Ancestry, but in the end, I think its clunkiness helped me see the benefit to manually entering my source data. I still reference that I found the source in Ancestry or FamilySearch, etc. when I enter the source in RM, but I get a much cleaner file in the end.
(2) Aside from sources however, syncing with Ancestry exclusively does not necessarily mean that I get the digital image of the document related with that source in RM. For example: Census images. If I click on the source in Ancestry, I can see the digital image. But this does not come over during the sync. Since I want to “own” my research exclusive of Ancestry, I download these images from Ancestry and upload them to RM either as Media tied to the Source or to the Fact, depending on what the media is. This way, if I ever stop subscribing to Ancestry, I still have these digitized original records.