Getting Ancestry accounts to work better with Family search
I feel that Ancestry website is an easier site to do Family History on then Family search. Then sinking the information to Family search that does not flow over to this site after all the hard research work on Ancestry is done is very frustrating. When we are connecting with these people in our trees or adding them to the tree it is feeling like we are accomplishing something but when we go to family search we see it is not really completed or does not sink the records just a link.
I have also found that even though someone has there info already on site anyone can come in and replace it all so that they name is on it but it was exactly the same thing that was there before and because it was replace or deleted now that person is disconnected from the Ancestry account as well. So the flow of information is stop because of this.
Is there a way to keep the same number with a Person on Family Search or lock them into place so they are not disconnected from the accounts (Ancestry, My Heritage and other Websites). Then once a fact is proven lock it into place so everyone isn't just changing the info so that there name is on it, because that is who they are researching for the day, If the information is there already why change it?
I like to us Family Search for researching but the Tree researching part is way to complicating for me but I have found it easier to build my tree on Ancestry but want the research that I have worked hard on with this Website, to add to the work that we do in the temples as well but feel like the flow between the websites just isn't up to what it could be. I wish it would just sink automatically (the records themself not links) after exciting Ancestry to Family Search, So I don't have to backtrack all the work I have done.
I believe I would have more family names in my family tree on Family Search because I sometimes go down so many rabbit holes I forget were I started from but have found so many families and records that I just keep going till I cannot go any farther.
I hope this makes sense.
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I guess it's all in what you're used to: I currently have a three-month Ancestry subscription, and I'm finding the use of that site to verge on the infuriating, most of the time. (And that's when it's not downright alarming: it offered me my high school yearbook photos. Why are those online?)
I'm not LDS, so I don't have any sort of connection between the two sites; I think that's actually a good thing, because it means I don't expect synching where there isn't any to be had. But because I don't have that linkage, I don't know how it actually deals with PIDs that are changed by a merge (which I presume must be the problem you're talking about in your second paragraph). If it's anything like the offline genealogy programs that can be synchronized with FS, the old PID should be "forwarded" to the new one seamlessly.
It would be nice if Ancestry's sources could be more easily cited on FS, but there's always going to be the paywall in the way -- even for the things that Ancestry got from FS in the first place. Thus, I've been doing a lot of demonstrations of how much easier it is to find something if you know exactly what you're looking for.
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi Ancestry is so much better at some things. I have spent the last 5 or so hours comparing 1810, 1820, 1830, and 1840 census records for several states to try and get a sense of a family group migration timeline for several related surnames. Each census is a handy link right on my Ancestry home page. It is fairly easy to click the 1810 census (for example), type in my surname of interest, and specify a county and state, look at the results, then edit the search criteria with one click to specify all surrounding counties as well. I can also widen my search to the entire state and all surrounding states. In another tab, I do the same thing for a different state on the migration route, and then continue to build my tabs with census records for different years and locations.
In FamilySearch, on the other hand, there is no quick and easy way to do the same thing. I have to use the catalog and find the census records, which is a pain, and FamilySearch does not have the capability to search a county or state and all surrounding counties or states at the same time. Why? In spite of how handy the catalog can be, I have not found it intuitive when I've wanted to use a collection across multiple counties or states. Like the census records. While I do conduct research by going to a person first, I also spend a lot of time zooming in on record collections for specific locations looking for surname instances. Besides census records, I've been diving in to court records recently, and FamilySearch is quite pitiful with its court record collections compared to Ancestry. Go look up Virginia or Indiana court records for any given county in both Ancestry and FamilySearch, and you will find literally millions more records in Ancestry than you will in FamilySearch. Plus there are no restricted images in Ancestry. Plus, in Ancestry, all court records for a state are in one collection that has filters you can apply to narrow your vision to a county and a year group or record type (such as probate vs order books). I can start off looking in one Indiana county, and switch filters easily to a different county by using a drop down list. With FamilySearch I have to go back to the catalog and switch counties.
Don't get me wrong, I am in FamilySearch DAILY, no change that to HOURLY. I will ALWAYS use FamilySearch, but I can't sit still and let Ancestry take hits. FamilySearch has some catching up to do in some areas.
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@Gail Swihart Watson, well, see, all of those features and collections are irrelevant to my family: my husband and I are both children of immigrants. Even if I include distant cousins who immigrated earlier, we don't have any pre-20th century relatives in the U.S.
Almost all of Ancestry's material relevant to Hungary comes straight from FS, but minus the images. This means that if Ancestry comes up with a hint, I have to find its equivalent on FS in order to evaluate it, because Ancestry sure ain't telling me what I need to know.
There is some material from places that are now in Romania that is on Ancestry but not FS, and that's where the "infuriating" label comes in: it doesn't know the first thing about Hungarian names (it thinks Julius and Gyula are different people, for example); if I search for a woman, it gives me totally-irrelevant results for women whose husbands have that surname; and I can't even just browse the images, because if I zoom in enough to read anything, it stays at that zoom (which is good) -- but goes to the exact precise center of the next image. Where there's absolutely nothing to see. So either I can't read anything, or I have to tediously pan over to the top left on Every. Single. Image.
Now, granted, FS has its share of annoying behaviors (there are reasons I don't use the Images section at all), and Ancestry does have some things that I'm interested in (such as my parents' naturalizations), but for me, Ancestry is very much not "an easier site to do Family History on".
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Searches and the quality of US Census indexing is much better at Ancestry -- it's been gradually degrading here for years now. But I definitely don't want it to be easy to sync personal trees there to here, because 1) people go longer without having their work reviewed and validated by other researchers, so the errors introduced will be larger and more severe, and 2) Ancestry's design flat-out encourages the spread of misinformation. Users are encouraged to copy unverified work from other trees to fill out their own, which most do without any thought given to validation. Other unverified, user-generated trees are presented as sources. Thru Lines, suggested parents, record hints, and Ancestry's "Historical Figures" pages are all based on unverified user trees, and the more the mistakes get copied from tree to tree, the more enshrined they become and the more Ancestry asserts they are truth.
We get a taste of what it would be like already with GEDCOMs, which horrific and abysmal enough.
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Quoth @RTorchia: "Ancestry's design flat-out encourages the spread of misinformation."
Amen! I still haven't entirely emerged from the rabbit hole that I went down due to a fabrication in The Famous Relative's parentage. (There are several public trees on Ancestry that have decided that his parents were his childless great-uncle and his wife the baroness. As far as I can tell, this fiction is based purely on the fact that the great-uncle was also named Albert.)
The thing I don't understand is, why doesn't Ancestry have some means of marking a proposed match as false? The best I can do is to ignore it, but I do that with all tree matches (including to my own work on my sister's Ancestry account, where our DNA resides), so it really doesn't do any good. The system continues to urge users to spread the garbage.
I think I will continue as I have been: ensure that FS's tree is as correct for these people as I can make it, with every source I can find attached. Despite its flaws, sourcing is far easier here than anywhere else.
(That's another complaint about Ancestry's error-propagation model: it doesn't propagate the sources. I stopped filling out my tree when I realized that none of the work I'd copied over from my sister's account had any of the sources I'd laboriously found and attached there. It's disheartening at best.)
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If one reads the print in both FamilySearch forums and Ancestry forums, you would be informed that both systems are trash. The world tree is trash and it is a certainty that someone will change your family to fiction if you try to work there so DON'T! The Ancestry trees are all trash and there is nothing useful there, so DON'T GO THERE.
Come on people. Both systems are incredibly valuable. Both systems have very deep wells of complex capability making it a certainty that inexperienced users will make mistakes. However, experienced users will find both systems very, very useful.
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Does that word "sinking" mean "synching" (synchronizing)? The use of sinking makes it sound like it's in a lake with no life preserver.
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I do not like people being able to add information to my tree! It takes away from my time searching and updating my tree when I have to go on and try to figure out how to correct their information or remove living people. I am no longer using Family Search for my tree due to this. The format of trees also need to be easier to use, I find it very confusing. I have been researching since 1970 and have a large tree. Trying to keep up with all the incorrect information people add takes away from my research time. This needs to be changed! Please!
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@CherylBG, it seems that you missed a highly crucial detail: there is no such thing as "my tree" or "your tree" on FamilySearch. It's all one tree that we all work on together.
Yes, people make mistakes. They make them on Ancestry, too -- and then the system over there encourages everyone else to copy those errors, until pretty soon, the mythical beast becomes impossible to kill, because there's no way to tell the system that every single one of those dozens of trees repeating the error is false and should be deleted, not copied.
In contrast, on FamilySearch's Family Tree, if you find an error, you can fix it. If the system suggests a record or profile match that isn't one, you can tell it so, and it'll go away for everyone else, too. If people keep adding an error back in (probably because Ancestry is telling them "these dozens of people have it in their trees, you should have it, too"), you can add an alert note detailing the error. You can also attach all of the sources, and detach all of the incorrect ones, and use the reason boxes as needed to explain every conclusion. If the problem is conflation of two different but similar people, you can do the same with the other person's profile. Yes, there will be work involved, but unlike on Ancestry, where you not only have no say in other people's errors, but also are forced to re-invent the wheel, over and over (because although it'll happily help you propagate conclusions, it forces every user to start from scratch with adding sources), on FS, there's a good chance that the work only needs to be done once. If someone else has already done something, there's no need for you to repeat it.
Also: if it was correct once, but someone messed it up, on FS you can restore the previous, correct values. It may not be easy, especially at first, as you learn the logic of it, but nothing is lost. Everything is saved in the relevant change logs.
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi Everything you just said is exactly why I don't bother with Ancestry outside of the records search. FamilySearch dedicates so many tools to stop the spread of misinformation, while Ancestry is just apathetic to the issues. As a test, I just set a person's birth date in Ancestry to 50. Not 1950, not 1850, just 50. Similarly, the death date is set to 60. (It was only 4 generations back)
As far as I can tell, Ancestry isn't giving me a warning anywhere, while FamilySearch would've alerted me and everyone else who sees it, in the tree itself, the person's profile, and the profiles of every close relative. Sure, it doesn't really stop people from adding the information, but it does make sure the people who care can figure out what's going on.
Not every issue triggers these warnings, of course, but a careful researcher can still find them and fix them.
(And I guess it's probably worth noting that the people at Ancestry almost certainly expect you to be careful enough to not do what I did, but if it won't catch big problems it won't catch small problems, and even professional genealogists mess up sometimes. Their errors need correcting too.)
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Ok @BraydenGraves and @Julia Szent-Györgyi You imply that bad trees are on Ancestry and that makes Ancestry bad. Why? Those people pay to have their trees the way they want to (well, ok, you can sort of do trees with a free account, but it's very limited.). What other people do with their trees is their business. I never look at other trees and neither should you or anyone else. I could care less about them. I use all the many tools Ancestry provides to help me research, and yes, when researching specific ancestors, I use the several tools available to line up all the trees which have that ancestor and I can see a list of all the sources attached to that ancestor on each tree. It's pretty cool, to be honest, even if I almost never find anything new. If some of the trees have bad parents or children of that ancestor, that's not visible in these views. I don't see that.
To say you don't bother with Ancestry because of other people's trees makes just as much sense as saying you won't bother with FamilySearch because anyone can mess up your ancestors.
I have to admit the comment about killing the mystical beast sent me into peals of laughter. But guess what? My ancestor who is that mystical beast is right here in FamilySearch (and in Ancestry to a more limited extent.) He was born in the 1600s and was the first of one line to come to the new world. According to FamilySearch he has had 10 or so wives, at one point he lived 150 years, and has all kinds of mystical powers about him. I just hope my descendants fight over me like that 400 years from now. It would mean I didn't get forgotten. Correct that mess? I have no desire to enter that fray.
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@Gail Swihart Watson In isolation, other people's incorrect trees are not that big a problem. The problem comes when the falsehoods leak into FamilySearch and other sites that are open-edit or may be used as sources. Suddenly, the mistakes are very much our problem.
There is another problem that turns me off, as well. What happens if I make a mistake? On FamilySearch, someone else could fix it, explain what went wrong, etc. In Ancestry, that could set me so far off course that the tree becomes worthless.
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BraydenGraves I use both FamilySearch and Ancestry together when researching and that way I stay in sync. I have a browser dedicated to Ancestry and a different one for FamilySearch. After a day like today each will have 20 tabs open. The 2 systems complement each other perfectly, in my opinion. So my trees in Ancestry pretty much stay on track with FamilySearch, at least the lines and individuals I'm researching. (I am terrible about completing siblings if I have a full set of sources for the direct line.). I will add Ancestry sources to FS and add FS sources to Ancestry as web links.
Yes, @Julia Szent-Györgyi I am sorry Ancestry doesn't have your Czech records like FamilySearch does ... My poor Czech nephew-in-law has a very very tiny tree there and I haven't made much headway here for him at all.
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@Gail Swihart Watson I use Ancestry all the time for finding records–I was actually doing so just before your earlier comment. I just don't like working on my tree there, for the previously mentioned reasons.
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@Gail Swihart Watson, I'm not saying that Ancestry is "bad" or "worse" because of the error-propagation. I'm just trying to say that because of the way it's set up, and the way most people use it, it's no better than FS. Both sites have their advantages and disadvantages.
I also think that some of the disadvantages of Ancestry could/should be eliminated: if there were some way to indicate disagreement with a suggested tree match, and enough such disagreements accumulated, perhaps their system could stop suggesting that tree. This would improve not only Ancestry's trees, but also FS's, and Geni's/MyHeritage's, and even WikiTree.
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi It's difficult to address disagreement in both systems. In one place on my tree I am making progress breaking down a brick wall. I have begun adding the sources AND the people to my Ancestry tree and they have different information from what I've seen with other people. So far no one has challenged me, but I am going to great lengths to put public comments in Ancestry. I am behind bringing all this into FamilySearch, partly because more work by other people has to be undone. This is the problem here. Dismantling work others have done is part of the process and I can't tell you how much I dislike doing that. I'm still thinking about how to proceed.
On my husband's tree, one of his set of great x2 grandparents are in dispute. (Germans from Russia, a tough set to source.) I did a DNA experiment in Ancestry using 2 alternate trees with my husband's DNA on one tree and his sister's on the other. I won't go into my process, but evidence is VERY strong that the couple who don't match the marriage record are the correct couple, so that's how my tree is now for hubby. Several people have messaged me that I'm wrong, that there's a marriage record, yada yada, and I've asked them to come back when they are a 3rd cousin DNA match to my husband and his sister instead of 5th to 8th, which is what they are. They get mad and it doesn't end well. In FamilySearch I just plopped both set of parents on the individual and not one single person has messaged me or changed anything.
So to me the problem of settling disagreements is hard in both systems.
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@Gail Swihart Watson (and all)
I think we will have to "agree to disagree" on what we perceive to be the benefits / disadvantages in the use of Ancestry compared to FamilySearch, etc. My personal experience is that I don't find its search engine too helpful, in that it seems I have to constantly reset criteria - having to move the "slider bars" even after I thought I had stipulated "Exact", or another alternative. Also, for records involving vitals for my English ancestors, I generally get better results from Find My Past and FamilySearch.
However, I do not agree at all with your comment (Gail):
What other people do with their trees is their business. I never look at other trees and neither should you or anyone else. I could care less about them.
That attitude seems very unwise, especially when many of those trees (in spite of their flaws) really do have value in helping to provide pointers (say) to the areas where our relatives might be found. As stated, one must not pin too much on their reliability, as one contributor is quite likely to have based their tree on another's. Multiply that two or three times and you have what is ostensibly a very convincing picture - of three or more people agreeing on a matter that has not been fully researcher by each one, just copied from the other tree. But, to ignore them totally could be a great loss.
I know you have stated in other threads that you do not usually make corrections to other users' inputs to Family Tree, but I cannot agree with you on this, either. Genealogy, in general, and within Family Tree in particular, should be a collaborative process. So, if you find errors, surely you must correct them with the properly researched facts, as by not doing so you are surely helping mislead others (who have an interest in a particular branch) into thinking the information recorded about their relatives in Family Tree must be correct.
Of course, I am not suggesting anyone has to make changes to other users' work in Family Tree, but believe it is not helping in making others aware of the facts about their ancestors if one refuses to "interfere".
Sorry for wandering away from the exact subject of the OP, but just wishing to make the point that all programs have their differences and idiosyncrasies, so getting them to "synch" together, in ways suggested, would be quite difficult, I believe.
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