Apologies for the long rambling post - but there’s a lot I need to explain.
I have two trees on Ancestry that I’ve downloaded to RootsMagic, in two separate RM databases. I regularly sync updates in these in both directions and I love this feature. BTW - I love the treeshare facilitiy.
One of my trees is the main research tree for my family that I, and other family members, regularly work on. The other tree is one that I use for “scratch” trees or other, unlinked research - lots of little trees, mostly all unconnected to each other.
However, I found that some of this “scratch” research actually linked into my main tree so I wanted to copy this across to our main tree. To achieve this, I used Treeshare to get all Ancestry updates into my RootsMagic scratch database. Then, within Rootsmagic, I dragged the relevant people from the Scratch database into my main database - merging a few duplicates where necessary. I was then, or so I thought, able to upload these people back into the main tree on ancestry using Treeshare.
I did all this a while back using RootsMagic 7 but I am now using RootsMagic 9.
Today, I was doing another Treeshare merge in my main database and I wanted to upload some updates from RM to Ancestry for one of these people I copied across. The list of changed people shows this person with both a RM and Ancestry icon but when I click on the person to pull up their RM and Ancestry details side by side it says “This RootsMagic person is not connected to anyone in your Ancestry tree yet”.
So I click the “Add” button to add them to Ancestry and go to Ancestry and search my tree for them and they aren’t listed.
It took me a while to fathom out the issue… when I view this person in my main database on RM on the family view and then right-click and do Jump to Ancestry - it brings up the correct person in ancestry but it shows them as being in my “scratch” tree on Ancestry.
So it seems the issue is that when I copied these people over from Scratch to Main - their Treeshare links to Ancestry remained as their Scratch versions.
I have some questions:
Is there anyway I can resolve this, without manually adding all these people by hand and then deleting the copied over people?
How can I identify all the people in my RM Main database that link to my Scratch tree on Ancestry?
Was there a problem with how I handled this copy over, ie is there a correct way to do this should I need to do something similar in future?
Is this a bug in RootsMagic 7 that has been resolved?
Sorry for the very long post, my first on this forum!, but I hope someone use some ideas to help me out of my predicament.
I hesitate to recommend any solution other than restoring your main RM database from a the last backup you made before doing the drag and drop.
Everybody in an RM database is either connected to the same Ancestry tree or is connected to nobody in an Ancestry tree. An RM database can’t have people connected to two different Ancestry trees at the same time, some to one Ancestry tree and others to a second Ancestry tree.
I’m not 100% sure of the details of what happened, but I think the drag and drop of people from the Scratch RM database to the Main database caused the Main RM database to become connected to the Scratch ancestry tree. Most of the people in the Main RM database do not have a corresponding person in the Scratch ancestry tree, and the link between the Main RM database and the Main ancestry tree has been lost. That’s why I think a restore of the main RM database is the only solution.
You can confirm Jerry’s hypothesis as a fist step… treeshare from your main RM db and confirm which ancestry tree are you connected to. It displays in the top-left corner
I’ve actually never seen this issue before. It really shouldn’t remember a link to a different tree. Can you give a screenshot of the TreeShare screen where it shows them with a match icon but not showing the match in the current tree on Ancestry.
Firstly, I’ll answer your questions and I’m going to add a second reply to let you know how I’m planning to resolve this (that reply will get a bit technical!).
Unfortunately, I am not able to restore a backup before I did the copy as I did this copy quite some time ago, possibly last year, and I also did that in RootsMagic 7 and I’m now working with RootsMagic 9. I have made lots of changes to my database since then that I do not wish to lose.
I have (hopefully) attached a treeshare screenshot showing one of the people (Ann Slee) that I copied across into my main family tree. This also shows that I’m connecting to the correct tree on Ancestry.
When I do an “Add” on Ann Slee, I do get a new person added to my main ancestry tree but with only the Name and Gender tags. I have two such Ann Slee’s in my main ancestry tree now.
I updated the name of Ann in my RM database to “Ann y Slee” and the two Ancestry records are now “Ann Slee” and “Ann x Slee”, just so I could see what Treeshare would show.
The extra two lines for Ann in the Treeshare list do show each of these on the Ancestry side and I can add Ann’s baptism to these via Treeshare.
Note - I’ve probably done a lot of updates, trying various things over the past year with some of these people, perhaps even manually adding some, but my memories of exactly everything I may have done is pretty vague!
I’m sure I’ve hit a rare bug when I did the copy over and I’m happy to share information to help resolve this (if it still exists in the later version of RootsMagic).
However, I think I have a solution I can work with, see my next reply for details of this.
I looked into a copy of my RM database using SQLite and found that the AncestryTable did indeed contain AnId references to my scratch database for 518 people.
My first idea was to update these references so they referred to my main database. In RootsMagic when I did “Jump to Ancestry” for one of these people it wasn’t able to find the person in Ancestry. I wonder if when I added these people to my ancestry tree they actually went to my scratch tree.
My next idea was to delete these 518 records in AncestryTable. This seemed to work as RootsMagic treeshare now thought these were new people and I could add them to my main database. This is the option I’m going to try with my “real” rootsmagic database.
I will now generate a list of all these 518 people so I can identify them and then I can work through treeshare to get each of them added to my main Ancestry tree and do any necessary tidy ups to merge duplicates. This should hopefully fix anything I may have done since the copy over.
Yes, I did the copy whilst I was still using RM7.
Once, I’ve got my current merge sorted and backed up, I’ll try a copy between the databases using RM9 and I’ll update you on how that goes.
Sounds like a good plan. Strange issue. If you haven’t already, you might consider enabling the Program Settings to prompt for back up when exiting and adding the date to the backup file name so that you have close to a daily (at least while you sort through this issue). Having frequent backups has saved me several times and I’m certainly not alone in that regard. Backing up w/out media does not create much of a HD impact. You just have to remember to periodically backup your media files as a separate task.
I’ve now ran a test with RM9 to copy people from database A to database B and found that it still retains the link to Ancestry Tree A.
I’m using Windows 11 Home edition and I have a second monitor connected to my laptop. Steps to reproduce the problem:
Open RM9
File → Open to open Database A (linked to Ancestry Tree A) - this is displayed on laptop monitor.
File → Open to open Database B (linked to Ancestry Tree B) - this is displayed on 2nd monitor.
In Database B view Person Z.
Drag Person Z to laptop window, ie Database A.
Pop up screen “Drag and Drop” appears.
From this I select all Ancestors and their descendants for Person Z, generations=14, descendants=3. I also chose not to link Person Z to any existing person in Database A.
I click OK and 21 people are copied into Database A.
I then select Person Y in Database A (this one of the people I have just copied into Database A).
I then click “Jump to Ancestry” for Person Y and it takes me to Person Y in Ancestry tree B !!
I closed RM down and opened Database A in SQLite and found 21 people in the AncestryTable had an AnId that referenced Ancestry Tree B.
kevinm… I already have my backups set to add the date to the backup file name.
I’m a very cautious person when it comes to overwriting existing backups.
Today I have even added v1, v2, etc to the backup filename so I have multiple backups from my work today.
I reported to development that the Ancestry IDs are coming over from the other tree. It is designed to do that assuming the other database didn’t already have a link to an Ancestry tree. This only becomes an issue when the receiving database is already connected. Odd how long it takes for something like this to be reported as an issue. Development will look at the behavior.
The only way I can think to fix it is to remove those added to the main research tree. Then make a copy of the scratch tree and disconnect it from the Ancestry tree. Once disconnected you can drag n drop the same people to the main research tree and add them to that Ancestry tree.
I suspected this was the problem, but didn’t say so explicitly. It’s long been known by experienced TreeShare users that dragging and dropping one person who is connected to an Ancestry tree to another RM database which is not connected will connect the second RM database to the same tree. But it’s not quite what it sounds like. Even though the second database is now connected, only the one person who was dragged and dropped is now connected.
As I best remember, it’s then possible to connect up all the other people, but doing so is a laborious one person at a time process. As Renee said, I don’t think it ever occurred to any RM users or to the RM developers that the RM database receiving the drag and drop might already be connected to a different RM database.
Since RM10 introduced significant changes to DnD I just tried reproducing your steps above with RM 10.0.2. (The one caveat is that I only dragged a single individual from Db B to Db A.) The results were the similar in that “Jump To” goes to the Ancestry tree linked to the source RM db, however Treeshare’s “Show on Ancestry” button goes to the Ancestry Tree linked to the destination RM db (as expected).
[EDIT: I then followed Renee’s advice and retested after disconnecting the ancestry link from the source RM db. Everything worked as expected — both “Jump To” and Treeshare’s “Show on Ancestry” button link to the correct ancestry tree. ]
Also, in my small test, all events, citations, and fact notes transferred via treeshare to the correct ancestry tree, although Ancestry-originated sources transferred as “Other Sources”. Though unfortunate that’s probably a better scenario than creating citation and media records in the ancestrytable without an associated person record.
It’s not a case of treesharing to 2 different ancestry trees. Rather, the issue is that the “Jump To” button seems to utilize the ancestry tree ID from the anID field of the AncestryTable and that table entry has bad information in it (ie the ID of the ancestry tree that the source RM db was linked to). Said differently, the issue as Renee noted, is that the source AncestryTable record should not be copied over to the destination RM db as part of the DnD operation IF the new db is already connected to a different ancestry tree.
Thank you for figuring out this issue. I also cannot believe it lingered in the shadows for so long.
I omitted an important sentence last night – my v10 testing results were following Renee’s suggested fix, which worked as expected in my small test. I’ve corrected that in the post above.
Finally, Renee’s fix deals with the RM side of things. A fix for the treeshared counterparts of these mangled DnD folks needs to be considered or a new tree needs to be pushed up with the subsequent impact on hints.
