Hi,
I am still playing around with RM9. To me the process for matching to FamilySearch seems like a huge step backwards. Unless I have missed something, it alone would be enough to persuade me to stick with RM7.
Match to FamilySearch when hints found
RM7 has the option to Match to FamilySearch when hints found. When selected, this works very well, matching something like 75-80% of the cases that I would want to match and saving a lot of time. I haven’t found this in RM9.
Match from ‘share data’ screen
If a previously existing person is already matched to FS, and his/her spouse(s), children and/or parents are not, then in RM7, I usually use the ‘Share data’ screen for the matched person and click on the people that I want to match one after the after. Each time I click on a person that I want to match, a screen comparing their data comes up, I click ‘match’, they are matched and I move on to the next person.
In RM 9, I start in the same way, but a) after the 1st screen, it presents another screen for me to confirm that I really want to match (an extra, completely unnecessary click) and b), much more seriously, RM9 then re-queries on its own database and the FS database to re-populate the screen. This process, which was completely missing in RM7, often takes 10-20 seconds per person.
Also unacceptably bad, RM 7/9 often line the unmatched people up if their details appear roughly the same, but if not, you have to pick the matching person in FS from a list. If the person to match is at the top of the list, ok, but if not, scrolling though the list is indefensibly slow; in the past few minutes three times it has taken me more than ten seconds just to scroll to the ninth or tenth person in the list.
People who have read my post on Treeshare, will know that manually matching people with FS also creates manual work to clear a phantom changed record with Ancestry.
The net result of these problems (4-5x as many people to match manually, an extra click for each one, a 10-20 second wait for each one, a further 10-second scroll through the list for some of them and an extra item to clear from treeshare) means that it would probably take twenty to fifty times as long to match new people to FS in RM9 as it does in RM7. I could not put up with this.
Using automatch
Use Automatch, I hear you say, and perhaps I could with a small change to it.
I have 56,000 people in my main tree, and it took 24 hours to run automatch on them yesterday/the day before after I used treeshare to download them from Ancestry.
The problem with automatch is that it starts at the beginning each time (probably taking the people in the database in the order of their ID number). My small fix would be to reverse the order of this process, starting with the most recently added rather than the first added.
This would make no difference on a first use - it would match all the same people, just in the reverse order. But it would be much better for each subsequent use. I could run automatch each time I load a new group of people and interrupt it when it had got through the new ones. As it stands, it takes an extra 24 hours each time I want to run it and is only practical to use once or twice a year.
My approach is to use Ancestry as my main investigative tool and primary database, then to use Treeshare to update a copy in RM which acts as a backup and which I can use for its data checking and reporting tools, its link to FS and its hints.
If the links between RM and both Ancestry and FS are too clunky to use, then this approach becomes unsupportable and RM has much less value for me. For the time being, I plan to stick to RM7. I have bought RM9 and may start using it if it becomes easier to use. Otherwise I will have a difficult problem if RM7 stops working.
Alan