How Can I Merge Family Trees in Ancestry.com
3 Answers 3
Fortunately information technology is non possible to incorporate large amounts of information from someone else'due south tree on Beginnings.com without going through information technology individual past individual.
This slows – but far from eliminates – the rate of:
- plagiarism: taking someone else'due south work and passing it off equally your own
- perpetuating faux information: many public trees on Ancestry are poorly researched
And so how tin you proceed if you lot do not wish to manually go through all the information, simply you are certain(!) it is correct? All you can do is:
- Contact the tree possessor and ask if they would provide the tree to you in GEDCOM format. Yous can so contain the GEDCOM into your tree. If they will not do this, it is unlikely they would have wanted you to download the tree wholesale anyway.
However, I strongly advise confronting this approach. Genealogy is much more fulfilling if you do the piece of work yourself.
answered Nov 15, 2015 at thirteen:26
Harry V.♦ Harry V.
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To complement the previous reply -- sites exercise be where people have shared their GEDCOM files for download. Here are some things to consider if you lot could download the entire tree. 'Best practice' is to Non merge their entire tree with yours, but to keep it dissever and to use it as a reference because:
- Some sites which allow users to upload trees don't take good mechanisms to allow the tree owners to update their tree. So the same person may have uploaded their tree multiple times (or on multiple sites). Information technology isn't e'er obvious which of these trees is the most recent, and without talking to the owner, you can't know if they even so agree with what they 'published' previously.
- Trees fabricated with the assistance of Hints may have errors because a bad identification was suggested by the hint algorithm -- and on a site like Ancestry that generates hints, yous don't know whether the tree was made for 'hint bait'. A person may attach a hint without doing whatever inquiry at all, simply to encounter what other hints may show upward if that speculative hint is 'correct'. Since Ancestry doesn't accept a flag to betoken the tree possessor is not sure about a particular source or fact, unless the owner leaves a comment to alert other readers, there is no manner to tell which role of the tree may exist soundly researched and which parts are speculative, except by guessing that the outermost bits of the tree are likely to be the almost 'iffy'. Now consider that any function of the tree could have been, at one fourth dimension or another, i of those 'speculative' $.25 -- or could take been copied from someone else's "hint bait" tree. (2020 Update: since Ancestry has introduced MyTreeTags, users tin can mark an private's entire contour with "hypothesis", "unverified" etc., but there is no standard flag for marking a single item on the profile as unverified -- the only thing users can practice is go out notes in the result'due south description.)
Some of the best professional genealogists I know warn people not to trust their piece of work blindly, but to evaluate the work yourself. You can learn far more by examining and evaluating any sources used, and asking why someone might have decided a fact was correct, than y'all can past simply plugging the raw facts from their tree into your own.
answered Nov 15, 2015 at 17:xviii
Jan Tater♦ Jan Potato
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I disagree with some of Harry Vervet's reply with regard to Ancestry.com I agree is not possible to bring large amounts of data from another's Family unit Tree to yours. There are basically 2 ways to bring another's Tree into your Ancestry Tree. #ane merge a Gedcom (ged) file to your Tree. All that does is brings names and dates into your Tree. It is no fun editing for duplicates, incorrect dates and misaligned branches. Too you lot do not get any underlying support from from the merged Tree. #2 The other way is to use an "Beginnings Member Tree" and link what y'all cull as "Select trees with relevant information". All that does is reference your person to the Tree where y'all got that data. No supporting detail comes beyond to your Tree. I don't think incorporating data has anything to exercise with plagiarism. False data comes over when yous choose "relevant information" that is incorrect. I hold the simply way to become another's Tree direct into Ancestry other than linking with "relevant information" is ask and receive. The idea of merging through Roots Magic is worth consideration, since y'all can bring all your Tree including support into Roots Magic from Ancestry. Too since you lot can print your Roots Magic Tree, it may be possible to pre-merge edit the other tree to prevent most problems (you lot volition always have a few errors). So if y'all can go the Roots Magic download of another'due south Tree information technology might be possible to merge and keep support. I think it is worth a try.
answered Apr 13, 2020 at 23:24
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It would be prissy if those who downwards voted knew as much about Ancestry as I do. Maybe a comment where I am wrong should be considered with your downward vote.
Apr 13, 2020 at 23:l
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Well aside from the poor formatting which makes your respond quite hard read I recollect the main issue is one of whether merging in other people's tree like this is actually a good idea in the first identify - the existing answers make clear that this is something which needs to be approached with extreme caution.
April 14, 2020 at 7:09
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Source: https://genealogy.stackexchange.com/questions/9943/how-to-incorporate-large-amounts-of-data-from-ancestry-com
If you have this advice and go slowly through corresponding copse , information technology tin accept time, but there are a some big benefits: a) y'all terminate upward including only the people that are relevant to you, b) the prove/facts/citations from those trees is COPIED into your tree, and thus then available to you lot to scrutinze, reuse, and duplicate offline.
Oct v, 2016 at 12:56