Understanding and Managing Ancestry sources

[eN0ch]

I hope I've picked the right sub-forum for this ... I'm hoping someone can help me get my head around the plethora of Ancestry sources that one acquires with a Gedcom import. I have a raft of questions and issues with them, but will confine myself to two just now.

Media links - I find that the Library/Archive links in the sources as they appear in Reunion don't work. If I click on one, after my browser opens I get this screen:
screenshot_335.png (Ancestry.com.au is the one I use, being an Aussie). It then doesn't matter whether I click the button to go to ~.au or the smaller link "Continue to ancestry.com". Either way I land up [after login] at my Ancestry account home tab, and that's as far as I get. No obvious sign of any button or link to get to the linked resource either. I've tried this many times with different source links; same result always. And no difference if I'm already logged in either.
Reunion's source interface doesn't seem to provide any way of extracting the contents of the link (or however one says that in geekspeak). So I just give up. If indeed these are broken links, there's little point in having a gazillion of these sources, surely?

Same title, different trailing nos. - I have multiple sources with the same title for the same person and event or fact. Some are plainly complete duplicates of each other (another issue in itself), while others are identical up until the last double-colon ("::") but the trailing numeric string is different.
screenshot_336.png Does anyone know what one is to make of these? Do they represent different records or pages within a larger repository (e.g. same census record, different street)? Or is it updated versioning of the same resource? And if the latter, is there any way of figuring one which one is the latest / most reliable?

[Bob White]

I'll contribute to one small frustration with regard to the login merry go round you find yourself in. Long ago, while logged in, I bookmarked my own page in Profile View. Then I never log out. Once in a great while, Ancestry will do maintenance on their servers that causes a logout but that is usually only once or twice annually.

I can't speak to your frustration with "links as they appear in Reunion" since I cannot see how they have been entered in your Reunion database.

[eN0ch]

Thanks, Bob. I'd love to try your login solution, but you'll need to unpack it for me. I'm not clear what you mean by either "own page" or "profile view". Is this in Ancestry? Or in my browser? Which tab? Does "own page" mean my main tree? Can you explain, please?

When I wrote the OP I wanted to include a couple of screencaps, but couldn't find a way to get to happen. Tried uploading images and also pasting links to Imgur. Nothing worked. Maybe I don't understand this board thingy? Anyway, if I can figure it out now I'll try to post a screencap of a source from Reunion. screenshot_334.png

[Bob White]

I'm referring to Ancestry. The Profile View is the page with all of a person's information (see attached). Since you are getting to it using a browser, there will be a URL in the box above. That is the URL to bookmark. And it doesn't change. I bookmarked mine at least ten years ago and it still works. I did it originally for a different reason which is that Ancestry defaults to bringing you to a record in Tree View which then required another couple clicks to get to Profile View where one does all of their work.

ProfileView.png URL Bar.png

[eN0ch]

… The Profile View is the page with all of a person's information … That is the URL to bookmark. And it doesn't change.… Profile View where one does all of their work.

ProfileView.png URL Bar.png

Ah right, gotcha. Thanks for clarifying. Helpful too. (Sorry this took a while. I didn't get an email notification of your reply. Just saw it today when visiting the board for something else). Cheers

[JMCWS]

I'm wondering why you're gedcomming stuff from ancestry into Reunion. That sounds like a total recipe for disaster to me. Isn't it also plagarism?

[Michael Talibard]

I agree with JMCWS. Your solution would be to stop importing those gedcoms.

[Blaise A. Darveaux]

...sounds like a total recipe for disaster...

Not necessarily. It depends on what the goals are for one's project and on what is done when downloading gedcoms.

For example, if you are doing just your ancestry (seems like most people do this) then you have relatively few people to research and you can take the time to gather every detail and carefully source every scrap of information you can find.

Other projects, such as mine to record all descendants of the first Darveau in North America, it is not possible (time wise) to do that. So far I have 12,757 blood descendants of my 5G Grandparents, and adding more, by hand, every day. (19,886 with spouses included, but not the parents of spouses.) Would I LIKE to have primary source validation of everyone's birth, baptism, marriage, death, burial events? Sure, but a lot of that has been done by other people already (like this site attempting to connect all the pioneering families of Quebec without duplicating people https://www.nosorigines.qc.ca. )

That said I have only downloaded a two or three GEDCOMS of other researchers that I have some confidence in the quality of their work. One was a gedcom of a non-Darveau ancestor (8G grandparents) of 14,259 people. And I have never downloaded from Ancestry.com (never even had subscription to it). (When you see other people's work that say they have traced their ancestry back to Abraham, it tends to make serious people skeptical.)

So downloading gedcoms may not be your cup of tea, but for other people and their projects it is the best they can do (until we have personal AI agents scouring the internet doing the work we are doing by hand now. Leister????).