6 replies to this topic

[BRM]

I was working with someone new to RootsMagic on importing a tree she had been working on in FamilySearch.  She was troubled that there were a lot of people she had entered and or matched to in FamilySearch that did not show up in her RootsMagic tree. She had used an import with 10 ancestors and 10 descendents, but the result is the same when using 4 to 6 ancestors or descendants.  She was using the free version and thought it might be a limited feature, but we duplicated the problem using my full version.  Upon looking into the issue, it appears that the people missing are the descendants of siblings of her direct line ancestors, basically the descendants of cousins.  We did a similar import starting with her farthest descendant,  and all the siblings/cousins came in, but it left out the ancestors of any spouses of the descendants she had entered.

 

This was not intuitive and we both assumed that if we imported with a request for 6 generations of  ancestors and   6 generations of descendants  (or other number)  it would list 6 generations of her direct line ancestors and 6 generations of descendents for all her direct line including all their downline descendants.  Did we miss something or is this the way it is.

 

If there is a way to include both ancestors and full down lines of descendents in a single import, we would like to know.

 

BRM

[Renee Zamora]

With the settings of 6 generations ancestors and 6 generations of descendants you will get, 6 generations of ancestors from the START person, and then 6 generations of descendants going down from the START person. It will not give the descendants of the 6th generation ancestor as you assume. You would need to start with that ancestor and do 6 generations of descendants from them in order to get all the cousins. It will not climb up a spouses line in either direction. Ancestors will only get direct line ancestors. Descendants will get a descendants with their spouses and children. If the spouse had a prior marriage with children they won't be included.

[BRM]

Thanks for the explanation.  This does make some sense based on how you explained it.  At least it it gives us siblings of direct ancestors.

 

A future update that let us import direct line ancestors and descendants of our direct line would be awesome, as it would eliminate significant imports and match merging operations to eliminate the duplicates that would occur on the direct line.

[BRM]

So yesterday, I successfully made a file where I imported descendants from FamilySearch into a personal  rootsmagic file. Worked great.   Today, I was trying to help someone else that had been the basis of my original question, and when we tried to import descendants only the person who's familysearch ID and their spouse was imported, even though we had requested importing of 4 generations of descendents.  I don't know what happened between yesterday and today, but today I couldn't download descendants on my PC or hers, even though there are numerous descendents in familysearch to import.

 

Anyone else experiencing problems?  

[Renee Zamora]

I just tested importing and its working. It would be best to open a support ticket with the FamilySearch ID of the person you cannot download descendants for, so we can look at it. 

 

http://support.roots...us_requests/new

[BRM]

So perhaps I need to better understand how FamilySearch import works.  The objective was to create a file in RootsMagic for one of our patrons that had her direct ancestors, and descendants of all her great great grandparents that they can use with other family members and cousins. I noticed that I could import several different descendant  lines from the great great grandparents that came in as different trees, but the import appears to stop as soon as it intersects someone already imported on another line. I could then combine the different trees using known relationships for the intersecting person.  I couldn't at this point use the newly selected root person (the patron) to do an ancestral search so that it would bring in the spouses lines because the import immediately stopped on the parents that were already in the tree.  Is this the way it is suppose to work, or is this a bug.  If it didn't do this, I assume  there would be lots of duplicates that needed to be merged, but I didn't have any duplicates come in on separate lines when I used different descendant imports that intersected prior to the root person.

 

Is there a better way to do what I was trying to accomplish?

[Renee Zamora]

Its best to always do imports into new blank databases. Then you can drag n drop the cleaned database into your main database.