Hi, I imported with the latest free version of RootsMagic my family tree published on familysearch, and in the list of people imported - and therefore in my .mtree file - there are people who are not in my family tree published on familysearch and whose names mean absolutely nothing to me. Does anyone have a possible explanation? Thanks in advance
How did you do the import?
Do/did the unrelated people appear in the familysearch tree or just in RM after the import? If the former I suspect that you will need to edit your familysearch tree and, when it is correct, download to a new RM tree. It may be that you have accepted an LDS hint that added people that you didnât want into your tree.
The way described in this YT video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAGt8qM-c0I&ab_channel=RootsMagic
Unknown names appear only in the .mtree file
Sorry but Iâm not familiar with the import system from familysearch so Iâll leave that to the experts youâll find here.
Itâs not your tree, or mine, for that matter. The import works on the FamilySearch Family Tree, which is a shared tree. It does not import the GEDCOM that you may have uploaded earlier to another section of FamilySearch, which is here:
To be more explicit : the results imported about my ancestors over 11 generations, such as in my family tree published on familysearch.org, are at first glance correct (even if, for example, I am told for a certain marriage of an impossible date, while in my tree on FS, no date of this marriage is stipulatedâŚ). It is in the index that these unknown persons are mentioned.
As stated, FamilySearch contains a shared family tree where anyone with a free Familysearch.org account can add people to THE shared tree using a browser or a software program like RootsMagic. I suspect that you may have added your own family tree to THE tree and someone else later came along and created additional people in THE tree with relationships to your family. So when you download people and events, you may have downloaded those newly created people with the previous family tree people you downloaded or updated.
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I know what you mean, but it is what it is, a shared tree. It may look like yours, because only you can see yourself, and living relatives, but if you go further back in time, and look at deceased ancestors and relatives, youâll see that theyâre all public like this one:
This person was easy to find, because you have a rare Flemish surname, and this profile was made by a user named Jean-Marc Moeremans, which is probably you. And if you look further, you can see that I added a new son, and a few sources, all by confirming some hints on the site.
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Letâs see if I understood correctly. Letâs imagine a living John Blabla, whose ancestor is James Blabla. James Blabla is imported into my .mtree file, because according to the current John Blabla, his late ancestor James married a woman in my FS tree, because I added her there. So John Blabla intervened in my FS tree to add this supposed marriage. While I know nothing about the Blabla family, nor about this supposed marriage. This is why there are in the index of people in my .mtree file a bunch of Blabla supposedly born and descended from this union. If this is indeed the case, I bitterly regret having chosen FS to develop my tree. I suppose that it is therefore not possible to import (other than piece by piece) from this shared FS tree only the names that I added. Neither with Roots Magic nor with any other tool. Thanks to your interventions, I will have at least understood the reason why people unknown to me are among the people imported from what I thought was my FS tree. Which was indeed the meaning of my 
question. Thank you - to each of you - for your help.
Euh ⌠I would be quite interested to know how you identified me ? Btw : my Flemish surname may sound rare to your ears, but it is relatively common in my country of origin.
Well, itâs quite easy. Your name showed on my initial search for a Peter Moeremans, which was sort of a random choice based on your forum profile. Iâm in The Netherlands, and assumed that Peter was a good choice, better than Pierre, because it may also cover emigrants.
And when I repeat my search, by surname only, using exact search, the 1st result shown also shows your signature, as you can see here:
In this screenshot, your user name is all over the place, and I guessed that it was you, because your forum name here, Jamie, matches quite well with Jean-Marc.
Iâm showing this one, because there are two unconfirmed hints on the right, and one of those could be easily handled by me, because itâs attached to a source, which I can interpret too. I wonât do that this time, like I did for the new son for that other profile, but if I did, it would be visible in the log.
I am assuming that Pierre is an ancestor, your ancestor, so I understand why you wrote about âmy treeâ. I have a big load of ancestors too, on the site, which are mine, sort of, but who are actually shared by thousands.
Now, if you look up this Pierre, in RootsMagic, and have hints for FS on, you will see a yellow ball next to his name, which indicates that there are unconfirmed hints. And that yellow ball will be gone once youâve confirmed, or rejected, that hint. And it will also disappear, in your RM, when I do that.
And when you go back to Joseph Pierre, whom I mentioned earlier, you can see what I did by selecting the Latest Changes on FS, and when you select his profile in RM, and click the blue ball in the pop-up, you get a new dialog in RM, with the Share Data tab open, and you can use that to add the son that I added, by confirming a hint, to your own database. And although that addition looked quite right to me, because it was supported by a good source, itâs up to you whether you add him to your tree in RM. And the same goes for the sources that I attached, also from hints.
And because itâs a shared tree, that weâre supposed to cooperate on, you have all rights to make corrections where you think that theyâre needed. And if youâre in doubt, and want to leave them alone on the site, you can still unlink and/or remove them in RM, where it really is your tree.
I use Gramps as my main program, and RM for my FS work, from which I import new branches when I want to, and when I see an unwanted one, I disconnect the persons in Gramps, and then run a filter to select all disconnected persons, and delete them.
And with these features in place, Iâm quite happy to work with FS.
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My surprise came from the fact that, most often, the full name of the members of a forum for example is not displayed, but only their username. Thus, discovering my full name and first name from only my username âjamiem23â seemed to me to be something close to electronic witchcraft. Obviously, when my last name is displayed, it is already much less witchcraft ⌠
Thank you very much for taking the time to develop all these details. If I say I regret having published my family tree on FS, it is not out of frenzied individualism, no. But for a simple reason: absolutely all the people I added to my family tree were only added after cross-checking their legitimate membership in my tree, based on baptism, birth, marriage, death certificates, etc. (Even if all these acts are not published on FS) You must know, and apparently at least as well as I do, that many people who practice genealogy like others practice gardening, are not as rigorous, and often take without further verification, by simple copy-paste, genealogical data gleaned anywhere. I take here the example of this marriage date said to be impossible by RM, while I did not indicate any marriage date for this couple included in my FS tree, for the simple reason that I do not have any act attesting to it. I therefore find it a pity to have to waste time and energy cleaning up unsolicited - and inaccurate - interventions in what I considered to be âmyâ tree. Even if I also understand your point of view, rejoicing precisely in the âsharedâ nature of trees on FS, potentially useful since the contributors would be as rigorous as you are. So thatâs my point of view.
That said⌠Without wanting to waste your time, but because this example could be useful to others, I propose this little challenge, consisting of linking the surname âTosseynâ (and its various spellings) present as we can see in the index of my RM but not found in my FS tree, to a person present in my FS tree. âTosseynâ being the ( first ⌠) surname that prompted me to publish my request for help on this forum.
This suggests that you need a plan. Do you have one?
How do you mean ? A plan ?
Well, if you think that the Tosseyns donât belong in your tree, you need a way to get rid of them, to break the connection between them and yourself or your proven ancestors. And if thatâs the case, there are several ways to achieve that, in the FS Family Tree, and in RM.
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Itâs unfortunate that you didnât understand that FamilySearch Family Tree is a community tree before you started. Never was a MY tree. Maybe in time FamilySearch will give us individual trees, but for now it is what it is. Be extremely careful if you decide to remove people that you added, because they are now part of the tree others are also working on.
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@jamiem23 based on the info above on Peter Moereman, I downloaded your tree? from Familysearch-- I did NOT get any downloads for the name Tosseyn-- I did however get a woman named Barbara TASSENOY b 1875 who married Simon Henkelman (Moeremans descendant)------The TASSENOY (from Bruxelles, Brabant, Belgique) and the Tosseyn lines listed above ( from Leuven, Flemish Brabant, Belgium) were born abt 100 years apart BUT actually lived 32 km ( 20 miles apart)âŚ
So just guessing here-- was this a brand new EMPTY database you downloaded the info into or was there info already in there? If empty, I suspect someone at some point had or still have the TASSENOY and the Tosseyn lines connectedâ such as Barabaraâ father Francois as Franciscus Tosseyn ( yeah I know they definitely are NOT) and later changed it but I canât find itâŚ
Even though these 2 names MAY NOT be the same overseas, IF you were in the United States and saw them living close by, you would definitely check to see if they were related as census takers ( especially) had a very hard time correctly spelling names of people from other nations
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