Importing from FamilySearch to Reunion on a Mac

[waltermathews4]

I found FamilySearch wonderful to automatically add many, many names from abroad--back to 950 A.D.-- after I put just a skeletal family line in FS.

Apparently a 3rd party app--Rootmagic, AncestralQuest, or MacFamilyTre--is needed to move those people to my Reunion tree.

Anybody made such a move from FS to Reunion to add names?

Any suggestions?

Thanks...Walter

[Herb]

Just a word of warning that you'll probably hear from others: While Family Search has millions of accurate records and is great for research, the "family" that you downloaded from the FS shared family tree might be wildly inaccurate.

[Michael Talibard]

I agree with Herb. I have never allowed anything to be added "automatically" to mine— I enjoy the (necessary) process of checking the evidence.

[Paul Reitz]

While I agree with Michael and Herb, there is an important distinction to be made between adding to an existing family file, vs. creating a new Reunion file to receive such records.

My first 10 years of genealogy comprised mostly 'genea-theology' records — stuff "everyone knows", but no one has good evidence. https://www.tamurajones.net/Genealog...ythology.xhtml.

Today Ancestry.com has ~ 2,400 family trees with a fictitious surname for my 5g-grandmother, that has spread to most 'one-world' trees. Until 2021, no one living within the past 150 years knew her surname (besides birth date, or when or where she married). All tree 'sources' pointed to other family trees, which pointed to yet others. Since it was wrong, a good record would never exist.

Best money I ever spent was finding someone who could read and translate the early 1700s German handwritten records. I'm learning how to 'read' the text, but only an expert can interpret the shorthand hieroglyphics that convey specific meaning and context.

__________________________

Update...

While attending RootsTech 2023, I found a presentation explaining changes FamilySearch had made/was making to the records of the unified family tree: https://www.familysearch.org/rootste...ew-person-page

The most interesting feature to me was "Relatives at RootsTech" [https://www.familysearch.org/en/connect/b72a8a10-4959-4bd5-b39d-f99b00e8a946].

It shows me 24,770 (!!) relatives also attending, with a graphical tree showing the connection path to the 'relative'. Many of mine went through an incorrect great-grandmother. I found the new instructions how to make changes was a great help to disconnect that wrong person. We'll see if it removes the invalid connections.

There's also a new feature to help avoid people making unwarranted or unintentional changes. Make a change, add a big red flag as an alert, and it prompts an instruction to a person viewing the data to carefully review before making any further change.