Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Task 1 - Upload RootsMagic 5 GEDCOM file to Ancestry Member Tree

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 is to create a GEDCOM file from my RootsMagic 5 database and upload it to a new Ancestry Member Tree.  

I did the first part of this task in RootsMagic 5 (File > Export) by including everybody and choosing only to export Notes, Sources and Multimedia Links:



The second part of this task is to upload the file into a new Ancestry Member Tree (On Ancestry.com, choose Family Tree tab, then Upload a GEDCOM, and fill in the blanks, then click on "Upload."



The upload of my 41,261 person tree took about three minutes.  It took another fifteen minutes for the tree to show up in my Family Trees list.  Here is a screenshot of the Tree Overview page:



As you can see, the 41,261 persons loaded, but no Media uploaded (as I expected).  After some time, a number of Hints were offered by Ancestry for some of my tree persons.

The Person page for Sarah Pray looks like this:


As you can see, the two Facts for Birth (it says "Mar" rather than "Bef 20 Mar 1630/1") and Christening (it says "Mar" rather than "20 Mar 1630/1") don't show completely in the Timeline field.  The Birth Fact is shown correctly just below the person's name.  My conclusion here, after checking more instances of this, is that Ancestry reads the "Double Dates" correctly, but does not display them correctly in the Timeline field.  I have noted this previously while perusing many Ancestry Member Trees.

The "Source Citations" tab for Frank Walton Seaver looks like this (scrolled down the page a bit):



The Source and Citation Detail are listed for each Fact.  Some of the Details are complete (e.g., the 1900 U.S. Census Fact Detail) and some are truncated (e.g. the 1920 U.S. Census Fact Detail).  The truncated ones are more than 255 characters.  My conclusion here is that the Source Citation Detail field in an Ancestry Member Tree is 255 characters.

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


The Notes listed above look fine to me - they have line breaks, no extra blank characters, etc.  

So what I learned in this experiment was that exporting a GEDCOM file (created by RootsMagic 5) to an Ancestry Member Tree resulted in:

*  The GEDCOM file upload for my 41,261 person tree with 30,000 source citations took only 3 minutes to upload to an Ancestry Member Tree.


*  The Media (515 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, did not upload to the Ancestry Member Tree.


*  The Ancestry Member Tree uploaded the "Double Dates" correctly, but did not display them correctly in the "Timeline" field on the Person Page.


*  The Ancestry Member Tree truncates long Source Citation Detail text to 255 characters. 


*  The Ancestry Member Tree reads and displays the Person Notes data correctly.  Note that only the tree Owner and persons designated as Editors can see these Notes.


The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/09/task-1-upload-rootsmagic-5-gedcom-file.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

2 comments:

Rosemary said...

Did you look at the "Facts and Sources" Tab on Ancestry or just the "Overview" Tab? I've found that dates are often truncated on Overview (missing before, after, etc) while you can see the complete date when you display Facts & Sources. Sort of annoying, but I imagine they don't have enough space on the Overview page for the full date.

Cousin Russ said...

Randy,

I think I have duplicated this issue between FTM2012 and AMT and have posted a blog:

http://ftmuser.blogspot.com/2012/09/task-1-ftm2012-and-amt-citation-issue.html

I concur with your 255 count.

Please let me know IF I have confirmed your observation on the Citation Detail in an AMT file.

Thank you,

Russ