Copying Info from Ancestry.com to Reunion

[rjmeach]

I've been a casual Reunion user for several years now, and have some information on my family tree entered there, going back about 12 generations of ancestors. This was information that my grandfather had gathered and compiled, but I'm not sure of all of his sources. Most I think were personal questionnaires from the 40s and 50s.

Recently I was gifted with an Ancestry DNA kit by one child, and got introduced to Ancestry.com. I'd like to make use of the resources there to build out and expand my current Reunion tree.

I have read some posts on these forums regarding using Family Tree Maker 2019 as an intermediate step between Ancestry and Reunion, but I'm not really understanding a workflow. I exported GEDCOM from Reunion and imported it into Ancestry, and purchased FTM to sync with Ancestry. Now what do I do?

If Ancestry presents a hint that matches do I accept it then sync to FTM? I read something about exporting from FTM to GEDCOM and creating a new temporary family file in Reunion to copy into my primary Reunion family file. Do I have to copy information item by item, fact by fact, to paste into Reunion, or is there a better simpler way?

I haven't done too much yet (since I wasn't exactly sure what I was doing) so the FTM and Ancestry stuff could probably be redone if necessary if I made a mistake so far.

If anybody can give me a simple overview, and explain the best workflow I would sure appreciate it. Thanks in advance!

Bob Meacham

Reunion 12.0
MacBook Pro 16" (2019) Monterey
FTM 2019 (24.0.1.252)

[Michael Talibard]

If I read you correctly, you are now starting to take your genealogy more seriously than before. There may be a lot of work in this, but here's what I would do: I would create a new source called something like 'from Grandpa' and go through it all, systematically so marking everything that came to you that way. Then I would check each and every BMD or other 'fact', using Ancestry or other research tools to find the original documents, and adding or changing the source as I went. If you do this, you will discover lots of new information along the way. This process is enjoyable—trust me—and yields a family tree in which you can have real confidence.

There are different views on where to keep the documents you find. I download them to my computer and attach images to my sources, whereas Bob White (unless I have misunderstood him) leaves them where they are, using FTM to quickly re-find them when required—and no doubt there are other methods. It might be worth your reading the 'Why Duplicate' thread on this forum. Anyway, the main point is to know where your info comes from and how reliable it is.