Monday, September 3, 2012

Problems in RM5, LFT7.5, FTM2012 and Ancestry Member Trees

In My FTM 2012 File Synced with Ancestry - only needed more Patience (30 August 2012), I discussed some of the issues I had with using TreeSync in Family Tree Maker 2012 to a new Ancestry Member Tree.

As I looked through the Ancestry Member Tree, I noticed several things that did notl ook right:

*  The most important thing was that the "double dates" (you know, the ones for January, February and March between 1582 and 1752) were screwy.  One entry said 0001 - 20 March 1630 - it should have said 20 March 1630/1.  There were hundreds of entries like this.

*  Long source citation details were truncated, as if there is a character limit.  My guess is that one the programs has a 255 character limit for citation details.

I set about to figure out why these happened, and where they occurred in my RootsMagic 5 > GEDCOM file > Legacy Family Tree 7.5 > GEDCOM File > Family Tree Maker 2012 > Ancestry Member Tree process.  My findings:

*  The RootsMagic 5 GEDCOM file export has the double dates in correct format.  The Legacy Family Tree 7.5 export to GEDCOM file did not.  I think that there is a setting in LFT to enable double dates in Options > Customize > Dates that didn't get enabled.  

*  The truncation of the long source citation details occurred when exporting the Legacy Family Tree 7.5 file to the GEDCOM file.  The RootsMagic 5 export to GEDCOM shows them complete. They also show as truncated in Legacy Family Tree 7.5 source citations.  

I decided to delete my newly created Ancestry Member Tree, mainly because the double date problem is pandemic in my file.

So what to do now to get my genealogy database without these problems into an Ancestry Member Tree?  I decided to do three tasks:

1)  Create a new RootsMagic 5 GEDCOM file and upload it directly to Ancestry.com as a new Ancestry Member Tree.  Will the double dates be correct, will the source citation details be complete, and what other problems will I find?

2)  Upload the new RootsMagic 5 GEDCOM 5 file into Family Tree Maker 2012 and see if the double date and source citation detail problems transmit to FTM 2012.  Then use TreeSync to add the tree to a new Ancestry Member Tree (separate from the first one), and determine what problems exist.

3)  Upload the new RootsMagic 5 GEDCOM file to Legacy Family Tree 7.5, make sure to turn on the double date indicator, and see what problems, if any, exist in that file (especially checking for the source citation detail problem).

I will report on these three tasks in separate posts in the next few days.

As a baseline, here are snippets from the RootsMagic 5 GEDCOM file for the two problems mentioned above:

*  The Double date problem, using Sarah Pray (1630-1667) from my database:


As you can see, in the 10th line, the BIRTh tag date is BEF 20 MAR 1630/1.  In the 19th line, the CHRistening tag date is 20 MAR 1630/1.  

*  For the source citation detail problem, the GEDCOM file for the 1920 U.S. Census for Frank Walton Seaver is:


As you can see (probably with a magnifying glass!), the source citation detail PAGE (the GEDCOM tag for citation detail) item in the GEDCOM is complete, all the way to the end of the "...Roll 747."  There are 290 characters in the source citation detail by my count.

As far as I can tell, the GEDCOM file created by RootsMagic 5 transmits the double date information correctly and the source citation detail completely.

What other problems have you found uploading a GEDCOM file to another program or to an Ancestry Member Tree?  Tell me about them in Comments.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/09/problems-in-rm5-lft75-ftm2012-and.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

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