Problem importing GEDCOM tree
Hi all,
I started doing my fmaily tree a few years ago in another website (Geni) and since then I have added over 1,700 names to it. But Geni is somewhat old. The tree is getting too big and crashing, so I decided to try to move it elsewhere. I exported a GEDCOM file of my tree and imported to two places, here and MyHeritage.
The import for MyHeritage seems to have run OK (Geni and MyHeritage are affiliated anyways), but the import here went downhill. Many people had their surnames deleted - and I don't know which other information might have been lost (there wasn't much else either, mostly dates and places of birth and death). Add my inexperience to this and when I tried to match profiles, I apparently deleted old stuff that was even more complete than my own records... I fear I have made a real mess. I was contacted by a distant relative complaining one person in her tree had documents deleted, name changed etc.
I also used an existing tree here to manually feed my Geni tree before I gave up because there were just too many people and when I used the match function in an attempt to link the trees, I fear I might have deleted important and more complete profiles, as well as branches that I had not yet completed. I need help to fix this or, better yet, to undo everything I did yesterday... I don't want to receive more upset messages. This big tree seems to have been constructed by joint attempts of different projects and it was not my intention to modify anything.
I've sent an email to the support, but I haven't received any answer yet.
Thanks a lot
Gabriela
Answers
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Sorry to hear about your unfortunate introduction to Family Tree. Sounds like you have run into one of its shortcomings which is that users are not forced to have some fundamental introduction and training in the whole system before starting. The instructions are particularly poor when it comes to one of the most dangerous features of Family Tree which is the ability to import GEDCOM files. There are a lot of posters here who feel that feature should be done away with. However since you already started the process, I hope they will see that to repeat that discussion here is beside the point and not needed. I also hope you don't get any more grumpy messages from your relatives while you go ahead and work on fixing things. You do have a new several months long project on your hands, I'm afraid.
First off, let me mention a couple of basic principles so we start with a good foundation for this discussion.
As you have noticed, Family Tree is a single, open-edit, wiki-style tree that all users work on together. FamilySearch took every database they have put together of user submitted and FamilySearch generated family history information collected since 1894 and dumped it all together to create Family Tree which opened in 2012. Since then, its about 14 million users have been working to clean up all that data and add new data to create a joint tree containing one profile for every person who has ever lived with as complete of information as possible which is all fully documented with all available sources.
Family Tree has a lot of great features and one that you will probably get to know quite well is the Change Log. It contains everything that has ever happened to a profile so that no information is every truly lost and everything that has been done to a profile can be reversed. So don't worry. While no one can just push a button and reverse everything you did yesterday, you can go back and fix anything that might need fixing.
Secondly, please let me review the GEDCOM import process. It is important to realize that there are actually two independent part of this. This initial import takes your GEDCOM and creates a static copy of it in the Genealogies section of FamilySearch. This is a way to store a file of family information. You access it by going to Genealogies under the Search menu, limiting the search there to Pedigree Resource Files and searching for someone you know is in your file:
This initial upload makes your information available to all users of FamilySearch. It does not add anything to Family Tree.
(To Be Continued)
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(Continued from my first post)
In order to actually add information to Family Tree, as I assume you have found, you go back to where you upload files, find the name of the file you uploaded, and click View:
This brings you to a screen where you can see a list of everyone in the GEDCOM. This is also where you begin the process of working through each individual one by one to add information to Family Tree. Yes, one by one. That is why the Help Center article about the process suggests that if one is going to import a GEDCOM to Family Tree that the file never be larger than 100 people. That is also why a lot of people feel it is better to do as you started to do and just take an existing tree and directly add the people to Family Tree one by one. Part of the reason for that is that you usually have to do that anyway because the GEDCOM import does not import living people, does not import any people with insufficient information to allow for comparison of duplicates, does not import any sources, does not import any documents or notes, does not always maintain family relationships, and does not make it very easy to compare entries.
But with care, caution and a lot of work, this importing process can be done. Exactly how many people of your 1,700 do you think you when through yesterday?
I'll quickly go through the process of moving information from the GEDCOM to Family Tree.
The screen I mentioned above looks like this:
As you can see there are four categories of people:
- People with potential matches in Family Tree. These are only potential matches. You have to carefully evaluate where they really are or not.
- People that can be added to Family Tree. This means that your GEDCOM has sufficient information for the program to be confident that there are no possible duplicates in Family Tree. It does not mean the person does not already exist in Family Tree. Just that the program could not find the person.
- People that already exist in Family Tree. This means the program is convinced that it has found the person in the GEDCOM in Family Tree and will not let you create a duplicate. This does not mean this really is the same person! Again you have to carefully evaluate the existing profile to determine if this really is the same person or not.
- Invalid people have too little information in the GEDCOM to do any comparison with people in Family Tree so the import process ignores them. Living people are just that, living, and you cannot import them.
To given an example of each:
1) This person can be added because her name, birth year, death year and date (not all visible without scrolling) are sufficient for the comparison process to have a high confidence that she does not exist in Family Tree. But I could still be creating a duplicate that I will need to take care later:
Clicking the Add button creates a profile in Family Tree and moves her information to the profile.
2) I have found the few times I have done an import recently that I never get Potential Matches any more. Years ago you would get potentially dozens of names and have to go through each one and decide if it was your person or not. I'm wondering if that part of the process has been turned off since it could really cause problems if you picked the wrong person.
3) If the program finds one very high quality match in Family Tree, the GEDCOM information and Family Tree information is presented side by side. This does not mean that these really are the same people! You have to again carefully evaluate whether it is or not. You can click on the person's name to jump to the existing Family Tree profile to see the full information about the person and the family. You are given the information to update existing information in Family Tree from the information in your GEDCOM:
4) This person is invalid because she just has a name and birth place. This entry cannot be imported into Family Tree because she has no death information in the GEDCOM even though that does not mean she is living:
So the best way to handle an import is to click on the All Individuals option and going down the list one person at a time and in an organized fashion keep track of where you are. When I do this, I have taken a screen shot of each set of ten names per page, opened each in my PDF viewer and crossed out each name as I finished with it. For each potential match, if any, and each "Already in Family Tree" I would open that profile in Family Tree before doing anything else to see if my GEDCOM really was adding anything or not.
For each "Add to Family Tree" I would take a look at my database and try to find parents or siblings of the person in Family Tree to see if the comparison process just missed the person. After adding the person to Family Tree, I would go to the profile and:
- Clean it up by adding any information that did not come over in the import.
- Add all sources I have for the person.
- Get rid of all the automatic "My GEDCOM" reason statements.
- Process any and all FamilySearch hints that start popping up by attaching all correct ones and dismissing any incorrect ones.
- Process any and all possible duplicates that start appearing by merging or marking as not a match as appropriate.
Yes, for 1,700 names this would be a several months long project. It basically takes just as long as just adding the people to Family Tree directly.
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Now how many names in the GEDCOM did you say you actually have worked on?
As far as making sure you have done things right and fixing anything that may have gone astray, I would suggest going back to the very start of the list of people in the GEDCOM:
and again go down one person at a time. For any that are now connected to someone in Family Tree, you can click on their name and jump to their Family Tree profile:
There you can click on Show All under Latest Changes and see everything you did yesterday. You can restore the previous information. You can undo or restore any merges. You can get everything back to how it was before you started then try again.
Restoring information is a little funny because you have to find the previous information first and click restore next to that information. The filters help with this:
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Now one comment in your post is a bit confusing: " I was contacted by a distant relative complaining one person in her tree had documents deleted, name changed etc." Would you be willing to post the ID for that person so I or others here can see exactly what happened? You should not have been able to delete any documents through the GEDCOM comparison process. Updating data could have changed the name and other information. Later merging two profiles also would not have deleted any documents. So something strange is going on or something is being misinterpreted. To explain what happened there will take working through that specific example.
I hope some of this has helped. I would suggest taking a nice long walk or doing some gardening, bowling, or whatever else you enjoy beside genealogy, make some long term goals, and come back to this GEDCOM ready to work. Please don't let this difficult start turn you away from Family Tree. It is a great place to work.
Just a final comment for now. It isn't "her tree." It is our tree. No relative of yours gets to claim your shared relatives as exclusively hers.
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Hi Gordon, wow that was very detailed, thank you a lot! This explanation should be the official one... very helpful!
I was so concerned yesterday that I spent basically the whole day to try to understand how the website works, and I found out this log with the change history of all the profiles... I undid some merges, deleted some duplicates and correctly merged those who had been re-worked by other people (I got more confused and agry messages today LOL). But that was far from all the problem.
Of all the names, I had to add about 900 of them to my on tree, and since they were too many, I basically put some music on and accepted everything kind of automatically, without really checking, so I didn't realise some profiles lacked surnames etc. I think I cleaned about 50 of them yesterday but there are potentially more, so I will have to go back to "Already in my Family Tree" option and check them one by one.... oh well.
As for the relative, I think I sorted it all out yesterday. Unmatching a couple of profiles, deleting the duplicates or correctly re-merging them restored all the information she claimed was lost. I am very glad the change history is not really lost...
Now let's see when I will find the time and patience to clean the rest of the mess and better complete my fmaily tree. I built my Geni tree based on my living relatives, but also using A LOT of documentation from FamilySearch.. some documents were really difficult to find due to misspelled names, name variation etc, and I did not download all of them... it all just started as a hobby, no methodology, no studying, just doing. Now, to think of going back to researching these documents again, deciphering those terrible handletters, just to add them to the respective profiles makes me lazy, I must confess.
But anyways, thanks again for all this help, it will be really useful for when I can get past this initial shock to work on my fmaily tree again.
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Glad to hear you are getting all this to work out. Just view this as a marathon instead of a sprint - Nah, that's not right. Just view this as a casual stroll around the world instead of a sprint. And look on the bright side. Each time I transitioned my family history, from paper to PAF for Mac to Reunion to New Family Search and now to Family Tree, I have found things that I couldn't believe I had done so poorly and had the chance to fix. The whole thing has gone from a hobby to a hobby I actually know something about!
One of the great features of Family Tree is it's hinting system. All those Family Search source you say were so hard to find will likely automatically show up as Hints to attach as sources as you get information cleaned up on the people you are importing.
Regarding some of the messages you are getting, unfortunately too many people seem to have been out sick the day of the "Co-operation means work together nicely" lecture in kindergarten. You may want to develop a little form letter along the lines of "Hi Cousin, isn't it great that Family Tree gives us a chance to meet and work together! I'm the (whatever relationship) of (this person). How are you related? I'm working on getting my information in to Family Tree. If you have any advice about making sure this is done right, please let me know. If our information is different, we need to discuss why and figure out the best information we can...." and so on.
Good luck on your efforts!
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Thanks a lot Gordon, that is valuable piece of advise. You're so nice! I will definitely save this template text for later LOL. I am learning that some people might be real angry at first, but when I explain I am unexperienced and had problems importing the GEDCOM file, they seem to go "oooh!" and it all gets better. I think they get a bit concerned all their work has gone to trash, and understandably so because it takes so much time and effort... but once they see this is no fight, just a mistake, they easy up.
And I think you're right, this is a stroll and the new tools to suggest documentation seem to work quite nicely, so that I might have much less trouble now. I might start working on it again soon...
Anyway, thanks again for all your patience and all your tips!
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