* "Syncing" with Ancestry

[British Kiwi]

After some more advice (Ancestry help was a little sparse).

I have my master tree on FH6 and a tree on Ancestry. My ancestry tree was my master tree before I was noting most of my sources. After a while of using FH I decided to start again and try and ensure every fact was sourced etc. Of course life got in the way and I think my tree has some of my French tree missing (Mum is French so quite a big chunk). I think a lot of this information is in Ancestry and will also be in an old version 3 FH plus notebooks and excel. To cap it all I have downloaded a lot of images from FMP and Ancestry during their free weekends and haven't had a chance to process everything properly. My Ancestry hints are a little out of control and include stuff which I have found but am waiting for another free weekend to accept the correct ones. I am also accessing a library edition for my course so again have downloaded a lot more information for my course and some of my hints but haven't been able to accept them. I also started going through my list of names in FH and Ancestry trying to make sure everything was the same but that is pretty slow.

So after all that waffle background, here is my question(s). Any ideas what is the most efficient and best use of my time to fix this problem/mess I have made. I thought about downloading from Ancestry and merging, but do I flag all the 'new' ancestry records so I know I haven't 'cleansed' them. I did flag everything in FH recently and every time I work on a person I am making sure everything is sourced properly prior to clearing that flag. And after that do I start again in Ancestry, or just update Ancestry with the Gedcom. If so how does that work? How does importing affect the attached images that I have in my account and the records of hints I have accepted/ignored.

I suspect that regardless this will take a while to fix up (especially with a baby and toddler) and hopefully will be worth it. As an ongoing maintenance (once I have fixed this), how do you 'sync' with Ancestry? Just keep importing? I don't want my whole tree and data on Ancestry and I know there are a few plugins I need to look into to minimise this.

Apologies for the long post.

Mel

[tatewise]

I am sure other FH users who 'sync' with Ancestry will have more detailed advice, but this is my overview.

Since you have decided to use FH for your master database, then eventually your Gedcom tree should always be exported from FH to Ancestry and not the other way. Except that is when you are able to download other peoples trees from Ancestry and merge them into FH.

There are Plugins and other tools to export your Gedcom without private data and living person details.

It is advisable when importing from any other genealogy program/website to first create a new Project and validate and cleanse the data. See how_to:index#importing_to_family_historian|> Importing to Family Historian for advice for all the popular programs. Only then should you Merge it with your master Project whereupon the Merge can cite a specific Source Record for every new entry.

You seem to have a lot going on just now, and have data in various places. The first thing to ensure is that your Record structures in FH V6 are just the way you want them before adding even more data. Because to backtrack and change structure after adding even more data will take even longer.

[British Kiwi]

Thanks Mike. I have only just started a proper cleanse of FH so maybe I will just import the extra people from Ancestry so FH has everything and then tidy up FH before copying back to Ancestry. I got an email today from Ancestry, 4 months for 20. Might be the solution to my clearing the hints back logs! I did try to do a merge before and got a bit confused with it. However that was just a few days from installing version 6. I might try again now that I am more familiar with this version and of course back up back up back up!

[British Kiwi]

Blimey merging is taking its time (though doing it one handed isn't helping). Any chance there is a short cut key for "Match"?

[British Kiwi]

Finally merged. I am going to make ongoing changes to ancestry through the search window but I want to update ancestry first. I will use the plugins to export and exclude certain information but how do I get it to update my existing tree?

[jimlad68]

There have been a couple of posts a bit like this that might be helpful:

Ancestry trees ~ import to FH (12217)
Ancestry trees ~ new to FH V6 (12210)
Using an Ancestry Family Tree and Family Historian (11570)

[British Kiwi]

Hi
thanks for thr links. I had already seen them but theu hadn't answered my question. I have decided tovdo a test on a smaller version of my tree that is still on ancestry. Looks like when you upload tjough it creates a brand new tree. I tried to create one with the same name to see if that would work but it said invalid ged file. I remember seeing sone posts about that so off to read that and download some plugins.
Mel

[jimlad68]

I'm not sure if they have changed it, but in the past you could not even overwrite an old tree, so to keep the same name you had to delete it, then recreate, meaning you had to reinvite your editors/browsers etc.

As far as I can see the only way to"sync" with Ancestry trees is via FTM which is better than it used to be. So if I were to update my trees on Ancestry I would either just upload new Gedcom or load my Gedcom into FTM and try syncing with that.

As said in other posts, Ancestry do their own thing, change how they do it and their data structure, as far as I know do not publish their file structure so interacting (plugins etc) is very difficult. The main thing is not to keep your "master" database on Ancestry trees or FTM.

[British Kiwi]

Well I now have two trees with the same name. I am loving the internet search part of FH so once I fix my ancestry tree it should be sorted. I suppose I do another merge/compare it will highlight which ones to amend. Or I will just go down the list of people.