Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Using RootsMagic and FamilySearch to Update My MyHeritage Family Tree

I posted my MrHeritage family tree in 2011, and since then I have not updated it very much, other than confirming Record Matches and attaching them to persons in my MyHeritage family tree.  I have only 40,071 persons in my MyHeritage tree.

In the mean time, I have been adding hundreds of persons, thousands of events, and thousands of source citations to the persons in my family tree in my RootsMagic database.  Now, I have 45,893 persons in my RootsMagic family tree database.  Over the last three years, I have been updating the event and source information I have for my ancestors back to the 5th great-grandparents in the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks series.  This effort has added much more detail to the ancestor profiles in my RootsMagic database.

How can I update my MyHeritage tree easily?  The only way to date has been to Edit each person in MyHeritage and add the dates, places and sources and notes by typing or  copying and pasting.  This is time consuming and doesn't add much value to my overall research, but does improve my MyHeritage tree.

I think I've found another way to update the information for my persons in my MyHeritage tree that doesn't take a lot of time, but updates my ancestral families in my MyHeritage tree.  It involves this process:

*  Update the information for a whole ancestral family in RootsMagic.

*  Match my RootsMagic persons with FamilySearch Family Tree profiles for those persons.

*  Update and match the birth, marriage, death, burial and other events (e.g., census, military, land, probate, etc.) in Family Tree for the family persons, including the relationships.

*   In MyHeritage, use the FamilySearch Family Tree Record Match for the ancestor to update the dates, places, events, etc. for the ancestor and all of his/her family members by confirming the match and extracting the event data into the MyHeritage profiles.

1)  Here is an example:  I will use my 2nd great-grandfather, David Auble (1817-1894) as the example.  Here is the top of the David Auble in the matching screen in RootsMagic with FamilySearch Family Tree profile for David Auble:


2)  The top of the MyHeritage profile for David Auble (1817-1894) before I updated it looks like this:


There is a Record Match for FamilySearch Family Tree shown at the bottom of the screen above.  I clicked on that Record Match, and could see all of the Events for David Auble in the FamilySearch Family Tree profile (three screens shown, skipping some text before the third screen):



 3)  If I click the orange "Confirm" button for this match for David Auble, then I can add the information for David Auble to my MyHeritage profile for David Auble:


and further down:


and further down again:


New information for David Auble is indicated on the left side of the screens above - that new information can be added to the MyHeritage profile buy clicking on the right arrows between the two columns.

4)  The screen above says "Extract information for 13 more relatives of David."  The 13 persons were David's parents, his spouse, his children and his siblings.  

I left out several screens; here is the last screen of those 13 persons:


The screen above asks "Want to extract all?"  I do, so I clicked the triple arrow below that question.  Then I clicked the orange "Save to tree" button and it all got added to my MyHeritage profiles for the 14 persons involved.  This took some time to complete the process.

5)  My David Auble profile now has added events for several census records:


Events for the other 13 family members were also added, but not for the spouses and children of those 13 persons.  This is much easier to do than adding information for each person in my MyHeritage family tree.

One source citation was added to my David Auble profile in my MyHeritage Tree - the source citation for FamilySearch Family Tree.  None of the Fact Notes or Sources for David Auble or his relatives transferred to the MyHeritage profile.  The Life Sketch in the FamilySearch Family Tree did transfer, as part of the source citation.  The FamilySearch Family Tree source, and any life sketch, was added for the other 13 family persons also.

6)  While this process is imperfect (i.e., not all of my information transferred from RootsMagci/FSFT to MyHeritage), the event data did transfer.  Users can go to the FamilySearch Family Tree profile to see the Fact Notes and source citations for each event.  Of course, some of the events for these persons are covered by other Record Matches and I can Confirm them as I have the opportunity and time.

Now my MyHeritage family tree has essentially the same event information that I had in the FamilySearch Family Tree, which I added using the RootsMagic FamilySearch Person Tool in the first screen above.

7)  My plan is to systematically go through each ancestral family, starting with me, and transfer the Event data for each family group from the FamilySearch Family Tree to my MyHeritage tree for the ancestral families.  

What I don't know is what happens when FamilySearch has a person who is not in my MyHeritage tree - a child or a sibling of one of my ancestors.  I will investigate that and see if the child or sibling is added to my MyHeritage tree.  I hope it is!

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Copyright (c) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

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4 comments:

Keith Riggle said...

Very useful, Randy. Now if someone can figure out a similar way to update Geni.com trees, especially adding people that don't exist there but do exist at MyHeritage or FamilySearch. Geni.com disabled GEDCOM import years ago, and I just never bothered to finish adding my tree because it was too labor-intensive. Geni has matches with MyHeritage, but as far as I can tell, I still have to manually copy the information. Sorry if this is a little off-topic.

Darlene Steffens said...

While this is a good process to work with I wonder if there is a reason to not delete your outdated MyHeritage tree and uploading a fresh copy of your RootsMagic tree. Looking for an expeditious way of keeping my secondary trees updated. Your thoughts please.

Keith Riggle said...

Darlene, one reason not to delete your MyHeritage tree and upload a new one would be so that you don't have to go through all the Smart Matches again (and force users of other trees to do the same).

Randy Seaver said...

Darlene and Keith,

My main reason for not just adding a new updated tree is that I have resolved thousands of Record Matches using the MyHeritage lists by database, and a new tree would have all of the ones I already have resolved. I don't look much at Smart Matches to other persons trees.

One problem I've found is that the FamilySearch Family Tree database used by MyHeritage is not up to date - the info in the FSFT data accessed by MyHeritage is my old data from my RootsMagic database. I need to wait until they update the FSFT on MyHeritage to update a number of profiles.