Is it possible to import trees from Ancestry.com or can you only import information on a person by p

anitaleighreeves1

Is it possible to import trees from Ancestry.com or can you only import information on a person by person basis?

Carol Lou Hill

You can't import a tree from Ancestry, you will need to compare and import person by person. Here's a video I created that shows you a way to do it easier. https://youtu.be/rWrEBak2YPA

Carol

anitaleighreeves1

Thank you for confirming and for your video.

Carol Lou Hill

You can submit a Gedcom to FamilySearch. It will remain as you submit it. Click on this page and go to the bottom of the page. https://www.familysearch.org/search/family-trees

JeffWiseman

Please be extremely careful with this. After the GEDCOM file is uploaded, it doesn't clearly identify that you are done with that part. The site then encourages you to "Add your data to the tree". The GEDCOM compare tool is very old, has not been updated, seriously impaired in that it does not give you visibility to all the information, change logs, reason statements, sources, notes, and discussions that you need to make intelligent choices about merging your GEDCOM data into the existing tree.

 

There has been some "Holy Wars" going on over this thing. A few clicks by someone not understanding the gravity on how that thing works can (and has frequently) blow away 40 years of research in a couple of seconds. The original data is still there in the history logs and theoretically recoverable, but frequently it's so far buried in incorrect merges that you have to rebuild everything. That usually involves removing everything that the GEDCOM owner previously loaded into the tree. The GEDCOM owner then comes back and finds all of their data in the tree altered and "Fixes it" by dumping their GEDCOM file into the family tree again. And so it goes on and on…

 

The tool also does not require you to provide a reason for any of the changes you make. Instead it adds a generic, but useless, reason for change of "GEDCOM file". Why was person X's birth date changed from A to B? Reason? "GEDCOM File".

 

So when you are running the compare tool and it shows you your GEDCOM data right beside the FamilyTree data and they are different, the tool won't show you the pages with all of the reasoning documented for why the FamilyTree data is correct. It just shows you the difference. Most people just assume that their data is correct, and then click the button, and all the previous reasoning and data values are blown away and replaced with the GEDCOM data value, along with a Reason for Change statement of "GEDCOM File".

 

Very easy to see when someone has done this to the tree. Extremely difficult and time consuming to fix. For several years, people have been begging FS to shut the compare tool down (at least until they can get around to fixing it and the sites that support it) but for whatever reasons, FS has chosen to leave it up.

 

I personally have had this happen a couple of times. Once I had 12 generations totally removed because some merged an ancestor from their GEDCOM file into my great grandfather, in spite of the fact they were born 100 years apart! Those merges would have only taken them a few seconds to do. It took me 3 days to undo them. If they dump their file back in again, it will still take me days to fix it.

 

Recently someone loaded a GEDCOM file with 26,000 names in it. Guess what…

 

So please be very careful

 

If you want to read some about it here are a couple of the discussions:

 

https://getsatisfaction.com/familysearch/topics/would-someone-in-upper-fs-management-please-explain-why-it-is-necessary-and-or-desirable-to-allow-gedcom-submission-to

 

https://getsatisfaction.com/familysearch/topics/uploading_of_gedcoms

 

https://getsatisfaction.com/familysearch/topics/duplicate-records-are-being-created-by-gedcoms