Workflow for Ancestry Treeshare and FamilySearch Data Share/Sources Share

RootsMagic
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After cleaning up a big mess that I made by not understand these features well enough, I spent about a year just entering everything manually from both sites. That includes manually entering my sources, citations and downloading and renaming media files. (I’m a lumper in case that helps). While I’m a pretty decent typist, it’s a lot of manual work and I’d really rather spend that time on research and analysis, so I’m dipping back into using Treeshare and FamilySearch Central.

I’m finding once again the issues with sources and citations that caused my problems in the first place, and wondering how other people use these features.

I’d love to hear your best practices and what works for you so I can figure out how I should handle this, or if I should just keep to my current practice of manually entering everything.

Thanks in advance for any insights you can provide.

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It means I lose a lot of the user friendliness of TreeShare and FamilySearch Central. But I never bring anything into RM via TreeShare and I seldom bring anything into RM via FamilySearch Central.

Even when I bring something into RM from FamilySearch Central, I only bring in the basic Person info. And even then I usually have to edit a little bit afterwards. But it can save a small bit of typing. I would be bringing in one person at a time from FamilySearch Central, not thousands at a time.

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Thanks, @thejerrybryan , that’s what I was thinking might be the case. It means that I will lose a lot of the benefit of those features, but maybe it’s better to do that than to spend all this time fixing things after you download from the sites. For example, I downloaded quite a few facts and associated sources (not even whole people) from FamilySearch last night, and now I find that I have 109 source records that all say that FamilySearch is the source. In my view, FamilySearch is not a source, it’s a repository, and with no way to move those citations, I’m going to have to re-enter them all, which is more work than just entering them correctly in the first place.

Thanks again for sharing your experience and wisdom. It’s much appreciated.

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I think as you mentioned many people will have different views on their workflows.

I’m a family historian vs. a genealogist so I don’t get all “Elizabeth Shown Mills” on my citations. I’m okay with the Ancestry citations etc.

I do have a different workflow for Ancestry versus FamilySearch.

For FamilySearch I use Tree Share mostly for adding or taking in descendants, not sources (but sometimes I do). For sources from FamilySearch, I mostly use a standard template I customized from “Simple Citations” that I use for RM in that case.

I do like Tree Share especially for Ancestry. It’s one of the major reasons I switch to RM. I love using the Ancestry Web-hints area to work on Ancestry hints.

If a Fact needs to be added in RM (e.g. Residence) I will add that manually so it is exactly the way I want it in RM, then I will let the Tree Share process bring in the citation and record in for that Fact in Webhints. At that point I will review the citation, footnote and make any updates are needed, add a caption and date to the record etc. and I’m done. Easy.

Like FamilySearch if I find a source outside of Ancestry etc. I will use my custom citation to add it to RM.

I am happy to answer any questions on my workflow. Hope this helps.

Rob

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This helps a lot, thank you Rob! Let me play around with it for a bit more and I may come back and ask some more specific questions about your work.

I really appreciate the time you took to respond.

Mardee

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After all that work I would recommend against bringing in information from either. I use information from Ancestry and FamilySearch, but I type in what I want to take from large shared databases.

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@mscheffler I’m curious with your comment. My experience using Tree Share with Ancestry or Webhints or even FS has been great. I only “share” what I need. RM gives you the ability to be somewhat selective on what you want to receive from the large databases or send to them from RM.

I agree everyone has their own workflow process - but I have had a good experience with Tree Share, especially using the web hints in RM.

Don’t get me wrong is Tree Share perfect ….no - but IMO it’s so much easier using Tree Share than inputting information into two additional databases - Ancestry and FS. Of course, this presupposes you want to try to keep Ancestry, FS and RM in line. Just one person’s experience.

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Thanks for taking time to comment. I’m happy to try to answer your question.

My main issue is how RM handles sources and citations coming from Ancestry and/or FamilySearch. The data for the facts seems to come over fine, but here’s what I have observed in the sources/citations and media files using these features:

  • Ancestry names their media files with numbers and the names provide no insight into what is actually in the file, so if you ever have a file get lost and need to find it again, it’s a challenge. RM drops all of the media files into a single big folder when it brings them in, so you end up with no file structure and no naming convention, again, making it virtually impossible to find anything unless you open every single media file.
  • Both Ancestry and FamilySearch seem to create a citation for every fact that the source is associated to. From an interface perspective, that makes sense, but that means that I end up with a separate citation for every fact for every person on a census, for example.
  • All sources brought from FamilySearch come into RM with a source of “FamilySearch Family Tree” rather than the actual source of the information. So, for example, I have a source for the 1950 US census and then citations for each family that appears in the census, but with FamilySearch, all of those citations end up lumped under FamilySearch Family Tree. And, since there’s no way to move them to the source that I created, it means that I either re-enter them all, or I have to hunt in multiple locations to see if I have the 1950 census for a given family.

As an example, I did a test to share data between FS and RM last night on about 4 people in the same family. That resulted in more than 25 files from Ancestry with names like 1010918901.jpg that had to be reviewed and renamed, then the broken links manually fixed.=. From FamilySearch, I ended up with 109 citations inside the source of “FamilySearch Family Tree” and most of them were duplicates - in fact sometimes up to 15 different citations for a single census page.

Hope that helps. Maybe I’m being too detailed about this, but outside of RM, I’m doing analysis and trying to produce genealogical proof statements, and it’s difficult to do that if I can’t find the sources, citations and media files when I need to review and transcribe them.

Thanks again for taking time to comment!

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I keep one master database in RM7 with some 310,000 individuals, many of whom were transcriptions from various historical genealogy books and periodicals covering my research of about 30 years. I explore the webhints that come up on the RM screen and the ones I encounter on Ancestry when addiing to my using my DNA database there. My much smaller 10,000 name database on Ancestry is linked to my several DNA kits. I have no desire to keep the two databases the same. When I learn new information from DNA matches I add them to the master database.

I do take hints from places like Ancestry and FamilySearch but do it on a one to one person basis. Bulk imports from any source can introduce innumerable mistakes and descrepancies. Also I believe that sources should be viewed individually before adding them. This can only be done by looking at them. My sharing is done through submitting updated gedcoms to Geneanet on a regular basis and I do occasionally add direct line information to the DNA data base on Ancestry.

I am concerned that the emphasis of many people to keep information on Ancestry, FamilySearch, etc. in sync in some instances is simply duplicating incorrect information from one place to another and fooling the beginners in genealogy that these database are more accurate than they are. These large databases are helpful in so many ways, but any large collection also can distribute so much misleading information as well.

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Thanks for your insight. You make excellent points. RM is my “master” database and I don’t really try to keep the three in sync because that would drive me crazy…and as you say, risks propagating bad information. I was, however, hoping to be able to share individual facts and verified sources between the two in order to avoid duplicate data entry. As it turns out, that may not be possible based on my expectations that the data be lined up in a specific way.

I absolutely agree with what you say about misleading beginners. I was one of those beginners and when I realized what a mess I had made, I spent several weeks trying to decide whether to just flush my work and start over or unwind the mess. I ended up taking a “middle path” of sorts by cleaning up what I knew to be right and ruthlessly lopping off branches that I didn’t feel were well-enough substantiated.

I haven’t used Geneanet - I’m curious as to what the factors were that led to you choosing that as the place where you share your tree? I had originally planned to follow a strategy suggested by another RM user to upload my latest tree to Ancestry from time to time and delete the old one. However, I did that once and realized that Ancestry is now recommending all of the same hints back to me - including documents that I uploaded myself. Sigh.

Thanks again for your help and insights!

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Actually Geneanet is now owned by Ancestry and shows up in the hints on Ancestry (a plus I believe). My RM7 gedcoms transfer quickly and without difficulty when I need to update. I don’t do media, however. I chose Geneanet to share my nonliving people because I liked the way it displayed the data.

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That’s very helpful to know. Thanks!

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This issue is in part because of the way RM works more so than because of the way Ancestry works. That’s because all citations imported into RM from anywhere at all have the same issue of creating duplicate citations. That includes GEDCOM, and includes GEDCOM produced by RM itself.

RM offers two closely related tools to solve this problem - one-at-a-time merging of citations of your choice and automatic merging of duplicate citations. I said “in part” because there is sometimes an aggravating factor with citations imported specifically from Ancestry. That’s because some but not all citations imported specifically from Ancestry can be different but the differences are only in their media files or Web Tags.

RM’s automatic merge of duplicate citations does not take such differences into account. It therefore used to merge such citations. It still sort can happen, I think, but I’m not sure. Such citations from Ancestry that differ only in their media files or Web Tags usually or maybe always have blank citation names. So RM changed the automatic merge of citations not to merge citations with a blank citation name. But if you change the citation names not to be blank, RM will still merge automatically those citations that are different in their media files or their Web Tags.

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Thanks, @thejerrybryan . I got burned on the merging of citations back before they enhanced the logic to no longer merge the ones with blank citations, so that is part of the initial mess that I had to unwind and now if there are what appear to be duplicates, I review them and manually clean them up.

Having worked a bit with interfaces in my career, I understand some of the challenges they’re up against, and it doesn’t help having a bunch of retired software professionals in their user group! :wink:

I still have a bit to work out about how exactly I’m going to do this, so I appreciate your thoughts and the others who have stopped by to help me out.

Mardee

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Okay my thoughts.

Okay there is a lot to unpack in your post. This may be a long post - sorry

I agree with you on the below and I will give you my process on how I simply deal with this

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I’m a Microsoft user (Sorry not sure how this would be on a Mac but I bet there is a same process). The best way to deal with this is to use Titles in Explorer and your files will look like this.

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How I get there – when I’m satisfied on a Fact/hint (using the GPS method) and I want to bring a hint into RM through Webhints – like I said before I will update the Fact in RM first then bring in the hint and record.

When I bring the record into RM via webhints – I update the caption in RM (for the record) with the title of the Ancestry record and name of the descendant if applicable. (Side note I do use Online Repository Assistant (“ORA”) so the copying and pasting is very easy).

Then I copy that caption from RM to the Description of the actual record saved in Explorer (by clicking the “pencil” in RM etc.) – Done quick and easy.

I’m not a professional genealogist…I just want to make sure there is enough “breadcrumbs” for future generations to know where I found a record. If I was doing this professionally, I may have a different answer – that is why I’m okay with Ancestry citations.

If a hint goes across others like a census at that point, once I’m done bringing in the hint – I will copy the Fact to the applicable Family members. That way later down the line if I come across a family member on that census all I need to do in webhints is accept the hint in RM to clear it in Ancestry and there is no need to bring the hint in again. IMO - This helps avoid duplications.

One final thought – I moved from FH7 to RM for the Tree Share (also used FTM I found RM to be better for me for Tree Share).

I wanted to keep especially Ancestry in line with my research and findings. I believe in some way future generations may not want to look at genealogy software and will find it easier to look at an online database.

I also believe in my opinion, with the AI evolution Ancestry and others are going to “explode” with information and if your software does not easily talk to these online databases – it’s going to be harder deal with your research workflow.

Sure, maybe AI (outside the online databases) or ORA can help in this situation – but I feel the Tree Share connection will also get better too.

If it was not for Tree Share, I’m not so sure I would have left FH7 because IMO it’s querying, media and interaction with ORA is a little better in FH7 than RM. RM is great (don’t get me wrong) and Tree Share/Webhints is its superpower which I think, for me, makes it a better choice for the future.

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Thanks for taking time to explain so clearly. I love long posts so no apologies needed!

I have started playing with Notebook LM from Google to help with transcribing and analyzing sources, as well as to fill in my Research Notes. (I use the Connie Knox method from Genealogy TV).

I had not heard of ORA before so I’m off to find out more about that.

Thanks again for taking time to explain and give me the level of detail that you did. It’s very helpful!

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Thanks to all for this discussion. I have not tried Ancestry Treeshare or Family Search Datashare because I’ve been afraid of all the problems mentioned here (and a few more problems I can imagine!)

Has anyone else tried to download an online tree into an empty RM tree, then used the Compare Files tool to decide what to bring over into your main RM file?

Thanks for your advice!

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My process is very similar. I hate the way Ancestry sources its citations so I manually enter the information in RM and EITHER bring over one source, edit it, then copy it (if I want to use it for other facts). This enables me to do stuff like make sure I have a web link within the source on RM to the actual online document on Ancestry (or wherever I found that record.) When I source a record from Find-a-Grave, I no longer import that source or description from Ancestry. I created a source in RM called “Find-a-Grave MASTER” that I use for ALL records. The source information is the same, but the citation details get customized for each record – including the web link directly to the correct page on Findagrave.com. This means that when Ancestry points me to Findagrave through a link, I clean up the url to remove the Ancestry.com tracking information and use ONLY the Findagrave link, and when Ancestry asks me if I want to accept that hint, I reply “No” with the explanation that “I already have that information.” I do the same thing with Newspapers.com. Essentially, I want RM to be my primary repository and working database, so I customize all my sources, images, and descriptions the way I want them in RM. Sometimes I’ll send these back up to Ancestry or FamilySearch so others can access the info, but I don’t just import their information into RM without editing and saving things to my desired RM format.

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Thanks for taking time to comment. Your workflow sounds very much like mine, until I tried to overthink it and thought maybe I was missing out on something easier. I swear, I should buy that t-shirt that says “wait while I overthink this.” :slight_smile:

I like the idea of pushing data from RM to FamilySearch or Ancestry rather than pulling from there, since it is nice to be able to share the results of my search with others, but I don’t want to mess up the structure of my data and sources in RM.

I’m similar to you in that my personal “requirement” is that all citations must have either a media document (copy of the original record) or a weblink to the source. That allows me to make sure that I have actually reviewed that document and also so I can review it again when I write up my research notes.

Also, the way you handle your Find-A-Grave citations is exactly the way that I do it, so that was helpful that it’s working for someone else.

Thanks again!

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I have not tried to do that but it’s an interesting idea. I may put that on the list of things to try.