Family Historian User Group

I feel for Pedro.

Uploading a FH GEDCOM to Ancestry produces an unholy mess, mostly Ancestry's fault but with elements that could perhaps be alleviated by FH itself (one relatively easy, one quite a large undertaking by exporting a reformatted GED).

I'm in much the same position myself, except too devoted a FH user ever to jump ship. Meantime I'm gradually finding ways to improve the transfer process and achieve a fairly decent result on Ancestry.

Given Pedro's particular situation of FTM experience and reliance on Ancestry, my own advice (with very heavy heart) is to stick with FTM and enjoy the admirably tight integration with Ancestry, while hoping for better compatibility with FH in the future.

Don't stop breathing, though. My one and only suggestion to Ancestry for a very modest (i.e. quick and easy) improvement to their GEDCOM handling has been acknowledged. Nothing more. It isn't worth their while because their competition isn't in the same league (*pace* Simon who says that FindMyPast is so great - not yet!).

ID:6888

Paul one option, might be to pre-process using a plug in the FH file.

I don't upload any sourced information to Ancestry, as I don't really trust the Ts&Cs as regards who owns my tree.

What are the core changes needed?

Ooh, Jane, trust you to think of T&Cs. I'm just going to forget you said that .

I'm not going to answer your question completely right now because I want to do some proper, controlled testing first of Ancestry imports.

Just let me mention a few things:

1. If your FH fact has a nice clean source and not much else, you get a clean Ancestry *sourced* fact.

2. If you have a fact Note or Age, that generates an *additional* *unsourced* Ancestry fact.

3. If your fact has a Place, that comes across clean. If it has an address too (like all my Census events), that gets completely ignored.

4. Ancestry seems to accept Age as part of an in-line Description for an event and process it accordingly. Otherwise it thinks you don't know it and proceeds to add it to the list of data it will provide 'Hints' for.

Love to get back to this when I've got a bit of spare time.

P.S. It's a long time since I checked out TNG. Now it's had an upgrade I'll hope to do further testing. Although not everyone can afford to set up their own website, and it wouldn't have the community links like Ancestry & Co, TNG should in theory be more compatible with FH.

Also, the more I use FH tree diagrams the more I hate Ancestry's offering (and don't mention GR or FMP). Full marks to TNG.

For TNG there already is the Export Gedcom to TNG Plugin.

Something similar for Ancestry FTM should be possible.