Well, it happened again, another merging disaster. I had a
member of my society come into the library yesterday when I was volunteering.
She was a little confused on the subject of Ancestry.com Trees, Family Tree
Maker Trees and the trees she access through her iPad using the Ancestry.com
app.
She kept talking about them being different trees. Since she
uses Family Tree Maker version 2014 and has her tree linked to Ancestry.com, I
explained that they are one and the same tree. Well, sort of. The problem is
that she had many “similar” trees on Ancestry. For Example; (I have changed the
names to protect her identity) She had one tree called “My Tree”, then another
called “My Tree(1), another called My Trees and then she had a few other trees
that were just portions of her original tree.
My friend explained that previous to having FTM 2014, she
had FTM version 8. Then she received an iPAD and started exploring Ancestry.com
and merging records she found into her tree. But since she was using FTM
Version 8 on her laptop, this was not synced to her Ancestry.com tree. She
still was doing separate things on her laptop. OUCH! She realized the error of her ways
and then purchased FTM 2014 which I helped installed on her laptop. I thought
at that time, I moved her Ancestry.com tree back to her laptop with version
FTM2014 since we decided she had done way more stuff on this tree than the one
she previously had on her laptop. That was back in late February.
So fast forward to yesterday and now I find she basically is
using two trees, My Tree and My Tree(1). To make things even more confusing, My
Tree on her laptop was tied to My Tree(1) on Ancestry.com and My Tree(1) on her
laptop was tied to her My Tree on Ancestry.com. She told me that the tree she
has been using lately on her iPad is showing “living” people. When I say “living”
I mean the person’s names are living as in viewing other people’s trees. I have
a feeling she was merging other people’s trees into her own and thus creating “living”
people in her tree.
She wanted to merge these two trees into one new tree, I
advised against it for several reasons. 1st of all, it would take
forever to merge two such huge trees into one. 2nd it may take a
while to sort through all the matches to verify that in fact they are the same
person. 3rd, I don’t have much luck when merging such similar trees
into one and since these were not my trees, I was scared.
So I decided to look at the trees and the people in them.
They were almost the same size with almost the same number of people, a
difference of about 9 people. Also, I found that she was correct that one tree
had “living” people in it. The other tree had the same people, however, with
their names. I suggested that we save the tree that had people’s names in it.
She agreed, yeah! Then I suggested that we remove all the trees from Ancestry.com
and start over. Again, she agreed. I explained that she might lose some facts
or people because at this point and time, we don’t know what is in this tree.
Again, she agreed and continued. I offered to save the trees from Ancestry to
her computer in a separate folder but she said she didn’t want to deal with
them. I deleted the trees from Ancestry.com. Then I went into her computer and
removed all but the tree we decided to keep from her computer along with all
the backups, new and old.
I re-linked the tree back to Ancestry.com, showed her how to
make a backup to a flash drive and turned her tree syncing into a Manual
operation.
She has decided to take the advice of a friend of hers, from
her DAR chapter to never, ever merge from Ancestry but instead manually key it
into her Family Tree Maker program. This way she would decide what she is
exactly merging in. I agree with her DAR chapter friend. I told her that I like using the iPad Ancestry
app as my lookup screen with my laptop. I will follow the leaf suggestions and
see them on my iPad but record them into my laptop (no merging). I find this
easier than switching screens on my laptop. I still have Ancestry open on my
laptop, so that I can save the source, but switching for the saving is simple task.
I noticed that she duplicated some of her people and I did
show her why this might have happened. I proceeded to try to merge one person to a suggested shaking leaf. I clicked merge and showed her the section
that shows who could get merged or added to her tree. I showed how when you get
to the other people it found in the source that you can ignore, add, or merge
into an existing person and perhaps she was “adding” instead of merging into an
existing person. I cancelled the merge and explained this is why it is
sometimes better to just manually record the information into your tree.
Fingers crossed, I am hoping she will be fine for now, that
her tree isn't too far gone and that she can recover from this little disaster.
Now I probably should start to practice
what I preach, but I must admit that sometimes I use the “merge” source facts
for my co-lateral lines instead of typing all that information myself. I do
this in spite of the fact that I don’t like how Ancestry creates my source
citations and it saves the media to my media folder, but I don’t have a copy of
it in my organized folders. I know I can look up the media attached to the
source, but sometimes I am looking at a printed document of my tree and what to
bring up the source and not have to open my program to do it. So note to
myself: go back and fix your files and do your research the right way for the
beginning.
