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    #1

    Starting a new Ancestry Family Tree

    In the new year I plan to join Ancestry and load my family tree onto Ancestry.

    I will likely join Ancestry.CA, as this costs the least, about $C 120/yr (plus tax?).
    I live in Canada, but most of my ancestors are from the UK, with some in US, Canada and Australia. I do not think it matters what country I join.

    My Reunion tree has about 4500 entries, with about 1000 multimedia files (TIFF, JPG, RTF, PDF) (about 250 MB). I have a fairly simple approach, not using many sources, but using the "Note" field to record items of interest., and multimedia to record B,M,D sources.

    I am asking for advice on how to handle the transfer,
    e.g. Should I just output a GEDCOM file and load it into Ancestry in one transaction.
    or is it better to try and split the tree and load it in sections.

    Is privacy filtering needed ?, I assume Ancestry will make living people Private.

    Any advice is appreciated.
    Tags: None
    #2
    Re: Starting a new Ancestry Family Tree

    Paul,

    The last time I did it, Ancestry wasn't able to import NOTES and it dropped all my sources on the way in. There are ways to force it to take the sources (but they generally involve "massaging" the GED file with an AppleScript before you upload it) but I know of no way to get the NOTES across (they would have to be mapped into Ancestry "Stories").

    I keep a not-very-up-to-date copy of my tree on Ancestry - mostly to lure in anyone on Ancestry who is also researching my family. But I have a web URL in the name of the tree that points them to my "live" data on my own genealogy web site. For example, my tree is named "Don Worth (www.bishir.org/gen)" and my wife's is "Carley Worth (www.bishir.org)". Carley's tree has about 10,000 people in it. However, I did not attempt to ship her media files (photos) into Ancestry. Not sure that is even possible as an automated process.

    By the way, if you do upload stories or photos, be sure to include your name and email address (or web address). People tend to indiscriminately copy what you have for their own trees without giving you any credit, but they usually won't strip out your name if you put that in the file.

    Others may have more recent experience.

    Don

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      #3
      Re: Starting a new Ancestry Family Tree

      Originally posted by Paul Bridges View Post
      In the new year I plan to join Ancestry and load my family tree onto Ancestry. ... Is privacy filtering needed ?, I assume Ancestry will make living people Private.

      Any advice is appreciated.
      I'm not a big fan of Ancestry public trees. A very large number of them have been created by Ancestry users by attaching other trees to their own, without checking any of the information in them. I created a very small and speculative tree so that I would have a presence on Ancestry, like Don Worth has done (mine is much smaller, though!), so that if anyone is interested in seriously researching, they can contact me. I just don't think you can beat genealogy software. I don't like the whole idea of "cloud computing". I'd be very careful with your sensitive data. You can mark it private if you see that it needs to be when it is on Ancestry, but why go there in the first place?

      Reunion beats Ancestry, hands down. There is just no comparison in the power and flexibility of Reunion over Ancestry.

      You can create a private tree on Ancestry, of course, but once you upload to Ancestry, my thought is that you've lost control of your tree.

      My recommendation is to follow Don's advice. Ancestry has some good research sources, but even those have issues: bad indexing is a sore spot for me. Ancestry is all about making money for Ancestry and giving amateur genealogists a sandbox to play in.

      Jeff

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        #4
        Re: Starting a new Ancestry Family Tree

        Thank you for your comments, but I am not replacing Reunion with Ancestry, Reunion will remain my primary tree. I am concerned about the future as I do not have a replacement for myself. This has been discussed previously in ReunionTalk.

        I need advice on the mechanics of setting up the tree in Ancestry, and maintaining it.

        Comment

          #5
          Re: Starting a new Ancestry Family Tree

          Originally posted by Paul Bridges View Post
          Thank you for your comments, but I am not replacing Reunion with Ancestry, Reunion will remain my primary tree. I am concerned about the future as I do not have a replacement for myself. This has been discussed previously in ReunionTalk.

          I need advice on the mechanics of setting up the tree in Ancestry, and maintaining it.
          Hi Paul,

          Reunion allows you to export an Ancestry friendly GEDCOM using Ancestry.com as the destination (File > Export ... > GEDCOM ...) but what you will find is that Ancestry will not import multimedia links, i.e. the images referenced in your GEDCOM will not be uploaded into Ancestry.
          In regard, sources and notes, I have had no problem with these at all (although the view notes option in Ancestry.com is somewhat limited and less than ideal).

          To share all of your research on Ancestry, including images etc is a more involved process. Ancestry allows you to upload these images (up to 15MB per image) via their web interface but you then need to link them to sources or people etc. This is the time consuming part, e.g. upload a birth certificate, link it to the source or to citations - doing that 1000 times would be unpleasant.

          A solution I used is to use Family Tree Maker 2 for Mac (FTMM2) and use that software to upload images that are linked to people. The trick is to export a GEDCOM with just multimedia and import that into FTMM2 which you merge with an Ancestry tree (if this interests you, I can explain in my detail). The windows version (I think) allows citation images to be uploaded whereas FTMM2 allows images attached to people. This is a nuisance but I only have about 100 images, not 1000.

          In regard "Is privacy filtering needed ?, I assume Ancestry will make living people Private" - that is correct. From Ancestry.com "Information about living people is automatically hidden from others and is NOT included in our search index.". The other posters comments re: privacy is open for your consideration.

          In summary, I would do 1 Ancestry GEDCOM export and review the result via the web (maybe do the first one as a private tree and delete afterwards). Upload afew images and see what works for you on linking the image to people or possibly, citations. I would bulk upload maybe 10 images initially and see what level of detail you want, e.g. to citations or to the source. The difference is how it appears via the web interface.

          Regards,
          PC

          Comment

            #6
            Re: Starting a new Ancestry Family Tree

            Thank you for your reply, this kind of information is what I need to know.
            I will try manually adding the multimedia to see how much effort it will take.

            Comment

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