I expect Family Tree Maker and RootsMagic use the same API to access Ancestry trees for syncing.
When importing a tree to RM 10 from Ancestry using TreeShare, citations related to Ancestry records do not have a web link in RM and if I manually edit the citation on Ancestry to include a web link to the Ancestry record, that also does not get imported to RM. I understand from previous posts that this likely because the Ancestry API does not provide a way to to import my manual web link.
A tree imported to FTM 2024 from Ancestry includes in the window showing citation details for an Ancestry record a link labeled “View Source Online”. Clicking that link opens the Ancestry record in my browser. The only reason I am experimenting with FTM is because it is too much trouble to manually add links to thousands of citations after I download my Ancestry tree or when I add a new citation.
Would it be possible for RM to have a similar link or button?
Sources and citations do not automatically transfer for RM from Fam Search they can be brought over manually. FTM essentially transfers everything over – in my experience that was a bad thing – it was a mess when I brought into RM from FTM - so I started from scratch. To be clear the mess came from FTM not RM.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. I am importing to RM via TreeShare from Ancestry, not from FamilySearch or FTM. The citations are transferring fine except I loose the link to the Ancestry record.
FTM syncs much better with Ancestry because of the similar data structures unlike RM. I always only sync up from FTM to Ancestry to avoid garbage source and media names and manually add new data. Try importing a FTM gedcom to RM although right now RM 10 is a flaky program on my M4 MBA crashing and locking up every few minutes.
Unfortunately I don’t at this time have a choice of which way I sync because I received the Ancestry tree already built out to over 700 people with thousands of citations. I am working on adding to that tree, but would like a desktop copy for security and to share with other family members. Once I’ve downloaded it to RM or FTM I can treat the desktop copy as primary. But I don’t have time to manually add thousands of web links.
If the RM database structure cannot handle the Ancestry web links in citations for Ancestry records, but the information is available through the API, as indicated by FTM’s ability to open the record in a browser, perhaps there could be an option on TreeShare and the import from Ancestry to get the link and put it in a RM web link.
A citation link does come across the API. It’s stored in the AncestryTable (the AncestryLinkTable in rm7). This is what enables the citation to be displayed in the Ancestry Source portion of the webpage on subsequent treeshare uploads (for example after a citation reuse task). However, the link is not in the form of a URL and it’s not visible from the RM user interface.
It remains to be seen whether or not FTM uses the same API. Regardless, having a webtag automatically created with a URL to the ancestry record would be a nice update if that info is available to RM.
What type of record are you having an issue with? Can you give us a screen shot of where the URL is on Ancestry? Are you trying to edit an Ancestry Source or Other Sources?
I am not having trouble editing records. The problem is that the citation downloaded to RM 10 from Ancestry does not a web link or any other way of opening the source record on Ancestry:
There is information available when that record is opened in my browser that is not available in the image RM downloads to Media. Manually adding web links in RM after downloading thousands of citations is impractical.
That looks like an Ancestry source and not one you uploaded and showing under Other Sources on Ancestry. Any changes you make to an Ancestry source are not saved in the API transfer. Unless Ancestry had a link originally showing you won’t receive it.
Please read what I wrote in my previous posts on this topic.
I received an Ancestry tree that I am trying to download to my desktop using RM 10 or FTM 2024. RM gives me no link to the Ancestry record that is easily accessed from the citation on Ancestry or on the FTM download. I like RM, but this kills it for me. It seems to me that if FTM can get me to the record there should be a way for RM to get me there, though possibly by a different mechanism.
I didn’t mention this earlier because I don’t want to detract from your feature request. While it’s not a 1-click method to view the citation, there is a shortcut available from the People Views to “jump to” the ancestry profile for the person in question.
This feature uses details from the api and will get you to the person even if the URL for the source catalog changes, though it involves an extra click or two.
As a user of both FTM and RM10, it seems you are correct that an Ancestry weblink is not associated with the citation in the RM10 source citation. However, in your screen shot, I notice that you do have a media image attached at the citation level. It would be nice to include the weblink for the Ancestry source in the RM view as does FTM2019/2024. Especially since the media sometimes becomes unlinked with the RM citation media image.
After many more hours of research, I found some clues to how FTM displays the cited Ancestry record. Here are the URL’s I observe when viewing the record via three different routes:
FTM apparently opens the first URL which Ancestry then processes to the second URL. (I had to do some fast clicking to capture that first URL and I may have missed other URL’s flying by, but I doubt it.)
It appears that “62308” identifies a database on Ancestry and “220181643” identifies a record in that database.
The GEDCOM export from Ancestry of my test tree contains this data:
0 @I142686057968@ INDI
1 NAME Susan M /Hansen/
2 GIVN Susan M
2 SURN Hansen
2 SOUR @S320879405@
3 PAGE National Archives at Washington, DC; Washington, D.C.; Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950; Year: 1950; Census Place: Markham, Cook, Illinois; Roll: 2539; Page: 5; Enumeration District: 16-200B 3 _APID 1,62308::220181643
1 SEX F
It looks like the tag “_APID” is the custom tag Ancestry uses to identify the citation’s source record in their database.
Although I have not installed the SQLiteSpy tool to verify this, I expect RM’s AncestryTable contains a record that saves the _APID value, “1,62308::220181643”, in its anID column.
If I have this all right, I would look into putting a button or link on the citation panel to open my browser using the anID to do a search ala the FTM first URL.
I had not looked at Ancestry WebTags since TreeShare was introduced. Many years ago, I was marrying a GEDCOM and media from a FTM TreeSync with an Ancestry GEDCOM from the same Ancestry Member Tree via imports into separate RM5 databases. At that time, the Ancestry GEDCOM included the link to the Citation in the Research Note and when RM introduced WebTags in RM6, I copied the links from the Notes into WebTags for the Citations.
I do little with TreeShare (little genealogy at all, to be honest) but your comment triggered me to have a look at the database. Sure enough, the _APID value is stored in the database’s AncestryTable albeit formatted differently from your example. Using your simplest example of the URL, I was able to generate working URLs for most of the 738 Citations in the tree I downloaded. Here’s the basic query:
SELECT
'https://www.ancestry.ca/search/collections/'
|| substr(anID, instr(anID,':')+1)
|| '/records/'
|| substr(anID, 1, instr(anID,':')-1)
AS URL
FROM AncestryTable
WHERE LinkType=4 -- Citation
;
My account is on the Canada domain for Ancestry so I used .ca instead of .com. Inspection of what is stored in the anID column looked to be in the format recordnum:collectionnum so I simply parsed on the assumption of there being only one colon character. That gives this result:
That first result was the typical format and, sampling several, most worked. Some returned a “We’re sorry! That page is no longer available.” It has been a few years since I created that tree.
The second result is an example of an exception to the single separator - it has two and needs to be processed differently but I don’t have an example handy.
So it looks like you are right - there is info in the API that RM10 works with and stores already with which RM could develop a WebTag from. Here’s the result from the 1st URL:
My Ancestry subscription is not currently active so I cannot confirm but as I recall the "xxxx:9000:yyyy " anID format indicates a non-Ancestry source that has been treeshared. If so, am not sure that type of citation is accessible as a webpage.
In my GEDCOM file of 60,000 records for my full tree, the overwhelming majority of the _APID records use a double colon. In that file the only _APID records with a third number between the colons are of the form “94330376:1030:14352637”. That record is from a citation labeled “Ancestry Family Tree” (NOT “Trees”) as are several other _APID records with 1030 as the middle number. All of my _APID records with a middle number have 1030 as that number.
If I open in my Ancestry tree the person record with which the above citation is associated, the citation then links in turn to a comparison between my person record and a person record in another family tree. Then, if I follow the link for that other person Ancestry goes to the URL
https: //www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/14352637/person/94330376/facts
which includes the first and second numbers as the record and database.
It appears that second number is a clue to how to format the URL to find records other than basic information records. So your speculation about your middle number sounds plausible.
As an aside, I found one person with two _APID records for the same source. It turns out the citation links to a comparison of my person to two people in different trees. One of them has a negative “record ID”, -379507907:1030:6045445, which appears in the URL for that person with the minus sign included. That negative number translates to 16-bit hex as “E961 2B3D”.
Personally, I would be very happy to just have links for basic Ancestry records.
Much to my surprise, in the Ancestry Member Tree I imported via TreeShare, there are two WebTags that got transmitted via the API and RM’s TreeShare procedure. They are for citations from an Ancestry Source Collection “Nova Scotia, Canada, Births, 1840-1921”. Ancestry does not have the image but provides a link from its index(?) record: " View image at Nova Scotia Archives website". The RM WebTag URL is a truncation of the foregoing Ancestry one: Nova Scotia Archives - Nova Scotia Births, Marriages, and Deaths. I can find nothing in the AncestryTable that relates to these WebTags.
So it seems that RM recognises something in the API stream that it imports as a WebTag.
