If you add a name from Ancestry as an alternate (hopefully) it is added as another primary name. The only way to fix that is to use SQLite and update the IsPrimary field to 0 for that name. Needless to say that’s not terribly user friendly. I tried the method described in: Multiple Primary Name "Facts" and it does work, but the lack of the flag on the Primary Name makes it difficult to “uncheck”.
SO:
a) Have Add Name in Treeshare work like Add Name in Family Search and add an alternate name.
b) Make the Primary flag visible on the Primary Name fact so it can be unchecked.
(bonus suggestion)
c) Allow duplication of primary or alternate name facts to ease data entry of multiple spellings of the name.
I have not encountered this problem and I use Treeshare a lot to bring data from Ancestry back to RM
I added an alternative name to a person in Ancestry yesterday and reflected it back to RM today using Treeshare. It appears as I had expected as an alternative name in RM.
Can you be more specific about exactly how the problem arose? Were you using Treeshare or exporting a gedcom. And if Treeshare, was it on the initial creation of a tree or on making additions/amendments? Was the name that you were adding from Ancestry an alternate name in Ancestry or was it the primary name there?
I suspect that the problem may arise if you 1) create a person in Ancestry, 2) download the record to RM, 3) change the primary name in Ancestry and then 4) add that new primary name from Ancestry as an additional name in RM. But I can’t see why anyone would want to do that.
In my case above, the person concerned stopped using his English name and started using a Gaelic translation; I want this as an alternate name in both Ancestry and RM, so I added it as an alternative name in Ancestry and for me these have always been reflected back to RM properly.
I generally don’t add anyone in Ancestry, I use RM as my master. I haven’t done a full upload or download to/from Ancestry in years.
In any case If I have someone in my database named John Crewson, and several matches in Ancestry have John Cruson, so I add the name John Cruson (which is the primary name in Ancestry) it comes in as another primary name instead of an alternate. If you add a name using Treeshare is should always be an alternate name, and update should change the primary name.
Thank you for these steps. I was finally able to track down what was causing these two primary names in RM. If you really only wanted to update the existing primary name in RM select that option instead of add. Otherwise, it appears adding the Ancestry primary name to RM sends it as a second primary name and not as an alternate name like it should. Once that’s done you have to jump through hoops to add another alternate name to RM, mark it primary so it will force the two other primary names to alternate names. I’ve reported this to development.
Thanks for chasing that down Renee.
