At the moment I am still using RM7, if I wished to upload just the facts for Birth, Marriage and Death to Ancestry could I go through all the Fact Sets that I have used and say ‘No’ to ‘Include GEDCOM’ against all the other ‘Facts’ that I have used? If the answer is ‘yes’ is there anything else that I need do and would this transfer to RM8 when I start to use it.
That should work if you are using GEDCOM to transfer your data to Ancestry.
That will not work if you are using TreeShare to transfer your data to Ancestry. You would have transfer all your data to a second RM database and you would have to turn off facts you don’t want in Ancestry as a part of the transfer. Essentially, you would turn off GEDCOM for facts you don’t want in Ancestry in your first database and drag and drop your first database to a second database. Drag and drop is a GEDCOM transfer. Therefore, your second database wouldn’t have your unwanted facts and you could use it to TreeShare up to Ancestry. Whether it’s worth it do make the second database in this manner is probably a matter of opinion. Either way, you would have to turn off GEDCOM for unwanted facts in your first database.
If this were my project, I would probably end up with three copies of my database. My first database would be my production database with all facts enabled for GEDCOM. My second database would be an exact copy of my first database, created via file File=>Copy in RM. The File=>Copy is extremely easy and fast. I would then turn off GEDCOM for unwanted facts in the second database. The whole point would be not to have to turn GEDCOM back on in my production database. Then I would drag and drop from the second database to a third database to get rid of the unwanted facts. Then I would TreeShare the third database up to Ancestry.
The fly in the ointment might be if you want to have Ancestry WebHints in your production RM database. In order to have Ancestry WebHints in your production RM database, your production RM database has to be the one you TreeShare. No matter how you go about it, there is no way to eliminate unwanted facts from Ancestry and also to have Ancestry WebHints in your production database. If you want to have your cake and eat it, too, you could have two trees on Ancestry. The first would be your entire production database including all fact types. You would keep this tree completely private. The second Ancestry tree would be the public one without the unwanted fact types and perhaps without really having all your people.
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Thank you Jerry, it sounds very complicated, do you know if it would work if I turned off the unwanted GEDCOM then transferred my database to Family Tree Maker as a GEDCOM file then it would then update an Ancestry tree automatically?
I don’t know, and here’s the part I don’t know.
Every time you updated your RM database, you would need again to turn off the unwanted GEDCOM and transfer your database to FTM. Well, you probably wouldn’t do it every time you updated your RM database, but maybe you would do it weekly or monthly or something like that. But I think you would need to make a new FTM database each time you did it. I can’t picture a way just to send your RM updates to FTM and have them be applied automatically.
Then having transferred your RM database without unwanted GEDCOM to a new FTM database, I don’t know if that new FTM database can be connected to an existing Ancestry tree. In the case of RM and TreeShare, such a connection is not possible. Such a connection may or may not be possible with FTM and I just don’t know. If you can get such a connection established between FTM and Ancestry, it should then be possible to update your Ancestry tree from FTM.
If not, then you would have to make a new Ancestry tree with FTM and maybe delete your old Ancestry tree. And that’s also how you could do it with RM and TreeShare.
Good morning Jerry, thank you very much for all the time you have spent on your replies, it is very much appreciated. I’m going to have a little play around later today and see what I can achieve.
If you make your Ancestry database a Private database, you’ll still get Ancestry Hints, but others won’t see your data. Ancestry Treeshare could still be used. If your intention is to make the basic BMDB data available for other researchers. going the GEDCOM route will work. I had the same problem, i.e., wanting to share some of my work but not all of it. Manually toggling the GEDCOM output settings on and off for hundreds of facts is too tedious and error prone. I wrote a Python script to toggle the RM8 GEDCOM OUTPUT setting for all or selected facts so I can do that easily.
I have long thought that RM’s fact list should appear in a spreadsheet format, with a row for each fact and with a column for each item that you can toggle. Then you should be able to toggle each cell just by clicking without any popup windows. It should be as easy as changing cells in a spreadsheet such as Excel.
But even if such a feature were available, manually goggling settings on and off for hundreds of facts would be too tedious. So I further think that there should be multiple sets of settings that you could save. You could call your sets of settings anything you wanted, but for example you might have a set of settings for BMD only or for “everything on” if you are going export and import GEDCOM to yourself. The “everything on” setting is desperately needed when you do a drag and drop because a drag and drop is really a GEDCOM export/import behind the scenes. So anything you have turned off for GEDCOM will be lost on a drag and drop.