Hi @RichardS,
I empathise with your problem. As a preliminary, you should note that the main treeshare interface does not bring up people with data differences between Ancestry and Rootsmagic; it brings up those whose data has been changed since it was last marked not changed. Unless you have made changes to their data, people are not highlighted to be compared no matter how different their data is.
However, even if you do make changes to the living flag in Ancestry, you still can’t reflect it to RM. To demonstrate, I marked one of my obviously deceased relatives as living in Ancestry without altering any other data relating to her
When I go into Treeshare, she is correctly marked as ‘changed’, but there is no option to update her basic information (sex, living, etc) in RM.
However, this is not the end of the story. I can force a change in this area, for example by changing her sex or in this case by adding a note.
But even when I choose to update ‘general information’ the living? flag does not appear among the fields to choose.
And even if I opt to update everything, she still appears as deceased.
.
I posted about a different bug related to this field
here. You will see a) that at that time RM was not updating its living? flag when a death event was sent from Ancestry and b) from
@rzamor1’s comment, that RM had been sending its living? flag to Ancestry (but not the other way around) when ever a change was made.
In my case, this led to people with death events wrongly set as living in RM, and then those erroneous living? flags being sent back to Ancestry corrupting my data there.
Although RM fixed the main bug that I raised very quickly, it did not add the living? flag to the Treeshare screen as I had requested. Indeed, I don’t know whether RM gets this field in its summary Treeshare feed from Ancestry, which if would need if it were to show it, although it would be odd if it did not.
So I think that there is clearly a bug here, which RM ought to fix if it can, and that it ought to ask Ancestry for an enhancement to the interface if needed.
In the mean time, I set about creating a series of searches to allow me to set the living? flag in RM for groups of people, notably those with a death event, any event more than 100 years ago, any marriage event more than 80 years ago etc. I also manually reviewed those with any event more than 80 years ago. Unfortunately, RM’s search tools do not allow you to include relative relationships, eg people with children born more than 80 years ago, so if you want to sweep through these, you will need to do something outside RM or something more manual.
And if you want to ensure that your datbases are in line, you will need to check Ancestry for all the people whose flags you update in RM. This may not be too easy to do if you use the ‘set living’ tool; it does not marked the people whose data has been changed as changed for Treeshare. So I set about finding people with potential problems using RM’s criteria groups, selected this group in Treeshare and went in from there to modify either or both of Ancestry and RM manually. It was a rather laborious process.
As I say, I empathise with your problem.
