I’d like to ask an open-ended question about the strategy people with large trees use regarding RM & Ancestry work. I have many one-off trees created to research individual questions. I have two trees that are more important to me than any other. One is my clean ancestor tree that only contains my direct ancestors, none of their descendants. Its 1821 people and keeping the RootsMagic and Ancestry versions in synch, and in synch with FamilySearch is relatively straightforward. The second is my Collateral tree which contains my ancestors and their descendants. Most importantly it contains about 750 DNA matches from AncestryDNA, gedmatch, MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA and LivingDNA and their connections(s) to me. This tree has 113,000 people. I make use of Ancestry’s features to connect matches to my tree, and use DNA tags for these people and up their connection lines to our common ancestors. This implies that the results of my research is scattered across an Ancestry.com tree and a corresponding RootsMagic file. Ancestry only allows you to connect your DNA results to a single tree so this is theh tree I use. This means that I cant do significant changes to a RootsMagic DB and overwrite my Ancestry tree because Id lose all of the tags and connections I’ve created. So, inevitably my RootsMagic and Ancestry collateral trees diverge over time. Right now I see that the Ancestry version has over 2000 more people than the RootsMagic version. Some will be duplicates.
Do other people wrestle with similar issues in keeping large trees in synch with Ancestry? If so, how do you minimize the aggravation of this?
Curious,
Peter
Many won’t agree with how I do this, but I use RM as my master and sync every change with Ancestry. It’s tedious, time consuming, but it gets me what I want and allows me to verify a bunch of birth, death, burial information against my database.
With nearly 40,000 folks in my database it’s a huge PITA, but it matches to my workflow.
Keeping them in sync is a major issue. I deal with it.
I have two very specific trees. One is my large 310,000 individuals in RM7 crated over 30 years that I upload to Geneanet minus living people every few weeks. The 2nd working database is an Ancestry DNA related database that I created from my larger one a few years back. It is connected to the Ancestry DNA kits and only had about 8000 people at the time of creation and is mostly related to direct ancestors/descendants and collateral families I researched while trying to solve direct line families. I have added only more names that I believe might add to further use.
I obviously use Ancestry differently from many of you. I may use some of the hints that many of you sync while adding additional family, but that is not my major approach. I do a lot of searches of individual families through census, vital records, and other Ancestry global search results of specific named individuals.
To concentrate on the hints in another database or new hints on your own database alone can lead one astray by making suggestions that make no sense were one to have researched specific individuals
Weekly I add individuals from DNA matches of 8 family kits to the large RM7 database but do not add distant ones to the Ancestry one so as to keep my matches closer to my direct line.
Generally, I believe that most people’s attempts to sync introduces many errors whereas researching individual people or small groups from global searches can turn up more accurate information. Also if I do use some of the hints as sources back to my RM7 database, I retype them in my own format for consistency. I would NEVER combine my own database with one from any other source. I have worked too hard to keep it consistent. Obviously, I find errors in it, but at least they are my own!
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