Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Task 2a - Upload GEDCOM File to Family Tree Maker 2012

In Problems in RM5, LFT7.5, FTM2012 and Ancestry Member Trees  (3 September 2012), I noted two problems when I went from my RootsMagic 5 file to a GEDCOM file to a Legacy Family Tree 7.5 file to a second GEDCOM file to a Family Tree Maker 2012 file to as new Ancestry Member Tree.  The two problems with the resulting tree were that:

*  Some of the "double dates" were wrong (one said "0001-20 March 1630" when it should have said "20 March 1630/1")

*  Some long Source Citation details (more than 255 characters) were truncated.

I showed in the previous post that the GEDCOM created by RootsMagic 5 had correct double dates for Sarah Pray and a complete source citation detail for the 1920 U.S. census for Frank Walton Seaver.  


In the previous post, I set out three tasks to investigate where these problems occurred.  The first task was to create a GEDCOM file from my RootsMagic 5 database and upload it to a new Ancestry Member Tree, which I did in Task 1 - Upload RootsMagic 5 GEDCOM file to Ancestry Member Tree.


The second task is to upload the same GEDCOM file to Family Tree Maker 2012, review the issues, and then upload the FTM2012 tree to a new Ancestry Member Tree using the TreeSync feature.  I'm going to split this effort into two posts - first the upload to FTM 2012, then the TreeSync to a new Ancestry Member Tree.

Part 1 of this second task is to upload the GEDCOM file created by RootsMagic 5 to a new Family Tree Maker 2012 file.  I performed this several days ago.  Here is the "Plan" View for the FTM 2012 file after the Upload:


I note that there are 41,261 persons in this file, with 509 Media items.

I am most interested in the "Double Date" import here.  Here is the Person page for Sarah Pray (used in the previous post):


I noted that the correct "Double Date" entries from the GEDCOM file are present for the Birth and Christening (the latter says 20 March 1630/1).  After checking other double date instances, I concluded that Family Tree Maker 2012 reads and displays the dates correctly.

What about a GEDCOM file created by FTM 2012?  Here are the lines in the GEDCOM file for Sarah Pray:


The entries for the DATE tags correctly reflect the "Double Dates."

Next I want to look at the Source Citation Detail for the 1920 U.S. Census for Frank Walton Seaver (similar to the previous post).  Here is the screen for this citation:


The Source, Citation Detail and Citation Text fields have the complete information transmitted via the GEDCOM file.  However, there are extra blank characters in the text fields.  I've noticed this, and blogged about it, previously, so this is not a new problem.  It seems to be limited to Family Tree Maker 2012 imports of a RootsMagic GEDCOM export file, however.

The lines in the GEDCOM file, created by Family Tree Maker 2012, for this source looks like this:


As you can see, the 1920 U.S. Census Source Citation Detail (the PAGE tag) and the Source Citation Text (the DATA tag) are complete, although with the extra blank characters in the text.

Lastly, I want to show the Person Notes page for Frank Walton Seaver:


As you can see, in the bottom panel, the Person Notes also have the extra blank characters in the text.  Again, this is a known problem of Family Tree Maker reading a GEDCOM file created by RootsMagic.

So what I learned in this experiment was that exporting a GEDCOM file (created by RootsMagic 5) to a Family Tree Maker 2012 resulted in:

*  The GEDCOM file upload for my 41,261 person tree with 30,000 source citations took about 20 minutes to upload to Family Tree Maker 2012.


*  Of the 515 Media links (to images in my computer files) that I had attached to my RootsMagic 5 tree, and which had links to the images in the GEDCOM file, 509 of them loaded into Family Tree Maker 2012.  


*  Family Tree Maker 2012 uploaded the "Double Dates" correctly, and displayed them correctly in the "Individual and Shared Facts" field on the Person Tab, and created a GEDCOM file with them correctly..


*  Family Tree Maker 2012 did not truncate long Source Citation Detail text to 255 characters, and created a GEDCOM file with them correctly, although blank characters are added to the Source field text.


*  Family Tree Maker 2012 reads and displays the Person Notes data correctly, although extra blank characters are in the Notes text.


Note:  The extra blank characters issue seems to be limited to Family Tree Maker 2012 imports of a RootsMagic GEDCOM export file.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/09/task-2a-upload-gedcom-file-to-family.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

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