Following on from my earlier message regarding losing data in the Master Footnote when exporting Source Citations to GEDCOM or Ancestry, I thought I’d do some more research for the benefit of this community.
I am now leaning towards just using the standard RM9 Free Form source template to record all types of Citations, as it seems most likely to offer the greatest compatibility for exporting to Ancestry and other applications.
With this approach in mind, I have completed a comprehensive mapping exercise to see where the data entered in the RM9 Free Form source template would end-up in Ancestry.
I created a new Source Citation using the Free Form template in RM9 and entered the individual “field name” as the value in every available field, including associated media items and the associated Repository.
The screenshot below shows the results after synchronising to Ancestry using TreeShare.
Nice work. Other templates that I’ve tested follow the same basic pattern that you have provided.
The one difference being the ‘Ancestry Record’ source template that RM developed for ancestry treeshare. If you treeshare a source from Ancestry to RM, that template gets used and an ancestry citationID field gets downloaded. (This is a hidden field.) Subsequent treeshares of that citation (including “reused” instances of the citation) follow a different rule. The source/citation is displayed in the “Ancestry Source” section of the webpage with data and media appearing just as it would if RM was not involved (ie all of the RM specific field data edits are ignored). If there is a fact note associated with the RM event it will treeshare as a separate but linked non-ancestry source.
Also, the ‘Ancestry Record’ source template has a ‘Title’ field so, if this template is used to create a manually entered citation, then the RM Title field maps to the ancestry Source Title field. Because the citation was created manually there will be no ancestry citation ID so the treeshared data will appear under the “Other Sources” section of the ancestry webpage.
