Monday, May 11, 2009

AncestralAtlas.com has GEDCOM capability now

I received an intriguing email today from AncestralAtlas.com - it said:

"Good news for your fingertips... No more typing – just upload your GEDCOM data!Mapping and sharing your family history is now even easier with our new GEDCOM upload facility. Upload your data, confirm its location, and you’re done."

I described my trials and travails at http://www.ancestralatlas.com/ in my posts Ancestral Atlas: Post 1 - First Look, Ancestral Atlas - Post 2: Events and People, and Ancestral Atlas Help offered in early March, and recommended at that time that a GEDCOM upload was required.

So I tried it again today after receiving the email. I remembered my username and password, so logging in was easy, and the user home page looks like this:


The five people that I entered with some difficulty back in March are listed on the left margin. There is a button to "Upload GEDCOM" in the top menu row, so I clicked on it:




The upload box says "We currently only allow one GEDCOM file to be loaded into your profile at one time."

I found the 23,000 person GEDCOM file in my computer files, and clicked on the "Upload Now" button. After 3.5 minutes, the system told me that there was an error and my GEDCOM wasn't uploaded.

I'm guessing that the file was too large (8.6 mb), but the system gave me no clue.

Being somewhat resourceful, I have a GEDCOM file of my last eight generations of ancestors that I used for Geni.com some time ago so I tried that (3,120 persons, only 1.3 mb), and after about 15 seconds it worked.

The box says: "Your GEDCOM file has been uploaded successfully, and is queued for processing. We will send you an email as soon as your data has been loaded into Ancestral Atlas."

That's encouraging to hear, I guess. When it is loaded, I will come back and see what it looks like.

This application has a good future, I think, if it can be made user friendly and informative. I'm curious to see what other information it provides besides the maps.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I've also tried this so will be interested to see how you find it.

My thoughts are here http://tinyurl.com/pydb8m

I enjoy reading your software reviews!!

Jo

Steve Hayes said...

After about 10 attempts to register, I just gave up. It kept saying that there were one or more incomplete fields, and when I REentered the information it kept saying itr was incomplete.