Thursday, June 27, 2013

Ancestry.com Quirk - RootsMagic 6 Person Notes Don't Always Upload to a New Ancestry Member Tree

I've been working a lot this week in my Ancestry Member Trees, since I'm making a presentation about them in July for the San Diego Genealogical Society.  I created a new GEDCOM file in RootsMagic 6, and used it as an example of creating an AMT using a GEDCOM file.

1)  When I looked at some of my persons in the newly added Tree, I found that the Notes were not transmitted completely.  Some persons had the Person notes, but others had what appeared to be a Photo Caption as the only line in the Notes in the Ancestry Member Tree.  Here is a screen shot from my new Ancestry Member Tree (called "Randy Seaver's Ancestors - July 2013") of Isaac Seaver (1823-1901):


2)  I got to wondering how this happened, so I went back into RootsMagic 6 and created a small working tree (called "Isaac Seaver-Media") for 4 generations of descendants of Isaac Seaver, and recorded the parameters I chose to create the GEDCOM file:


I unclicked everything but Sources, Notes and Multimedia links, as shown above.  Here is the screenshot of the Notes for Isaac Seaver in the uploaded AMT using those Export GEDCOM parameters:


So I duplicated the problem.  Because a Photo Caption was in the Note, I figured that putting the "Multimedia links," which include photo captions, might be the problem.

3)  I also created another GEDCOM file (called "Isaac Seaver-No Media") in RootsMagic for the same selected people, but left the "Multimedia links" unchecked.  Here is the Notes page for Isaac Seaver after I uploaded that GEDCOM to Ancestry.com as a new tree:



It appears that the GEDCOM file that is read and interpreted by Ancestry.com when I left the "Multimedia links" item checked in RootsMagic 6 for a GEDCOM 5.5.1 export becomes corrupted somehow - substituting a photo caption for the Person notes.  However, this doesn't occur for all people!

4)  I looked at the GEDCOM files for both of the newly added Ancestry Member Files.  I didn't see much difference, except the links and captions for the multimedia links were in the "Media" GEDCOM file and not in the "No Media" GEDCOM file.

I wonder if other persons have had this problem. and if Ancestry.com, or RootsMagic, has knowledge of it?  I can't be the only person uploading a GEDCOM created by RootsMagic 6 to Ancestry.com, can I?

I hope that both RootsMagic and Ancestry.com will review this problem and report back to the genealogical community of their findings.  I don't know which end of the string is causing the problems.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/06/ancestrycom-quirk-rootsmagic-6-person.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

2 comments:

RootsMagic said...

Can you email me a copy of that GEDCOM file?

Anonymous said...

Randy

Doesn't the same thing also happen with Legacy ?

Thanks Nancy
cunningb2@gmail.com