I use treeshare to upload my RM tree to Ancestry. Currently, the information displayed on the Ancestry Profile page for any uploaded fact is the name of the fact, the date field for the fact, place details, place, and the description (limited number of characters). I would request that instead of sending the description from RM to the fact description field of Ancestry, that RM send the sentence associated with the fact. If someone just wants to send the description, then they can put [Desc] as the sentence. But by sending the sentence we can upload much more information into the Ancestry description field, including the names and roles of other people associated with the fact. Ancestry doesn’t support shared facts, but by displaying the RM sentence, Ancestry viewers can get a description of the fact along with information about those who share the fact with the principal person.
That is not an option in the Ancestry API.
I don’t think you can blame the Ancestry API. If RM stored the fact sentence in a text field or if Treeshare generated the sentence text during the upload, that text could be associated with Ancestry’s Description field via the API. If I enter the sentence text generated by RM into the RM description field, that text appears in the Ancestry description. This is what I want. I don’t think the API needs to be changed. What needs to change is a single field supplied by RM to the API.
However, TreeShare is bidirectional. Take the sentence which includes the value from the RM Description field, send it to Ancestry Description field, return it to the RM Description… Now the sentence repeats the original sentence within the sentence. Maybe the software could detect that the returning Description matches the original sentence and ignore it but I am sure that there will be unwanted consequences of complicating the procedure. I wish something could be done for shared events and Associations to be supported in TreeShare but they, too, require some sort of workaround of the API"s limited features.
If RM had a text field that contained the sentence text (not the template), that field could be associated with the Ancestry description field via the API. Only changes in the sentence would be detected, not the RM description field.
Someone changes the sentence template for a fact type. What happens to this Sentence Text field? If it is updated for all such facts, then it’s a change to be updated to Ancestry. Oh gosh! One at a time, just as was the case for changes in the master Place List. So, now, those differences are ignored. Without batch updating through TreeShare, that’s a non-starter.
Yes, you are right, all sentences for that fact type would need to be changed if the template were changed. That is what the user would want, but that would require RM to change all the sentence fields for that fact. And even worse, treeshare would find differences between Ancestry & RM for every mismatch. Yes, that’s a non-starter without batch updating.
However, when multiple people share a fact, I would like to copy the sentence text and append it to the description field of the principal person. However, the sentence text displayed at the bottom of the person view cannot be copied.
Thanks for pointing out the issues with my request. I don’t think there is much interest in the idea, even if it could be easily done.
There may be significant interest in it from the user community but the developer community of two people may not have a commensurate level! Batch updating over TreeShare has been oft-requested. If that were provided and worked reliably (the last year or so has been difficult for users of FTM2019 which does do batch updates), many would be delighted and it opens up the possiblity for your idea.
Actually MIGHT be easier to put in a feature request to be able to copy the fact sentence text-- besides just writing the text sentence, there are 2 other options as a work around…
First would be to publish a report for the person in question–save it to note pad or word-- then copy the sentence from there and paste it into the description field or the note field for the fact ( both should upload unless you mark do NOT upload notes)–think it would be faster for me to just write the sentence as at least every other fact in the report start with He / She instead of the person’s name…
2nd option is to copy and then paste into note pad etc what you entered for fact name if applicable, date, place details and place–add the few words and commas etc and then copy and paste that into the description or note field-- in the following, everything NOT in BOLD is what I had to add to complete the sentence text for one of my facts…
Mel Acorn was born, 13th Iyyar, 5543, at 100 Vista Ave in Birmingham , England–date of Hebrew Calendar for May 15 1783
just make sure NOT to exceed there limit for the notes/description field–abt 100 characters…
Thanks, Nancy. I have considered going the report route to capture the sentence text, then paste it into the description field. I will probably do that with people who share facts with several others, such as Census records or Tax lists. By the way, I believe the Ancestry description field can hold up to 256 characters.
You should test that in both directions in TreeShare and exporting to GEDCOM from both the Ancestry Tree and from RM. I recall seeing truncation around 100 characters somewhere but that was a long time ago that I tested so don’t take my word for it.
Edit:
From GEDCOM & DnD transfer losses #gedcom – SQLite Tools for RootsMagic
Fact Description fields longer than 100 characters either truncated or transferred to the Note. Prior discussion here predated the changes in RM to address truncation by moving the data.
I tried one fact last night that used the description and note field–it truncated it at abt 100 characters total–no transfer to notes…
The number of characters allowed in Ancestry’s description field appears to be inconsistent. Sometimes it is over 200, but others around 100 characters. You are right. To be safe, count on no more than 100 characters, otherwise data is lost. The Ancestry field “LifeStory text” holds considerably more text, but as far as I can tell, treeshare doesn’t share any data with that field.