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DaveR

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Everything posted by DaveR

  1. I bought TMG v9 yesterday, downloaded one of my trees (26,000+ people, 180,000+ citations) from Ancestry.com to FTM 2014, exported that in FTM 2008/2009 format and started the TMG v9 import process. That was 18 hours ago. It is roughly 45% of the way through the first step (importing people and names). This is on a multi-core Intel i7 with 8GB RAM and a SSD running 64-bit Windows 7. Is that normal??? Are there "best practices" for dealing with Ancestry.com data? Should I think in terms of thousands of family twigs instead of several trees?
  2. Terry, I pulled the tree into Second Site (taking the defaults and limiting it to BMDB). Second Site automatcally included clickable links to citation images (e.g., census pages) so that pirt looks like it will work. Dave
  3. Terry, 180,000 citations is a large number. It is difficult to manage. Even within TMG v9 the Master Source List is so slow as to be unusable. I tried exporting the GEDCOM for one person with two addresses that needed fixing from TMG v9. I merged that into FTM 2014, specifiying the records to prefer, then did the sync to Ancestry. That process retained the links to source images in the Ancestry tree. The difficult part of the task (for me) was getting from the Master Place list in TMG v9 to the person whose records were affected. I ended up takeing the place name as it appeared in the TMG v9 Master Place list and looking it up in FTM, whcih shows exactly which people are involved. I took that information back to TMG v9 to do the GEDCOM export. There's got to be a way to do that within TMG v9, but I didn't find it. I suppose I need to see what this looks like in Second Site before I repeat the import process N times. Dave
  4. Terry, I hear you. I picked up FTM just because of the sync option. Aside from import/export tasks, I only use FTM to clean up place names in Ancestry trees. I could do that via GEDCOM import/export at the expense of losing 180,000+ clickable links to sourse images. While I find those links useful and easy to create, I often wonder if they are worth maintaining given the primitive tools and givien that they are essentially limited to one repository Even downloading a tree from Ancestry to FTM, deleting the Ancestry tree then uploading it again from FTM breaks 180,000+ clickable links. If I want them back, I need to once more document 180,000+ citations AND delete the no longer clickable links to the same citations uploaded from FTM. No thank you: way too labor intensive. I am early in the TMG v9 leaening curve. I will look into Second Site to see what's involved in getting clickable links to source images that way and will also look into what changes I can make in TMG v9 and have them show up in an Ancestry tree without breaking any clickable links. I'll pick a much smaller tree for such experiments though. Dave
  5. Terry, This works: Download an Ancestry tree to a new FTM 2012/2014 tree or sync to an existing FTM 20012/2014 tree. Import the GEDCOM for the branch you want to add into the FTM 2012/2014 tree Synchronize the FTM tree with the Ancestry tree manually add the relationships for the new people to their proper place in the Ancestry tree. If the GEDCOM is "pruned" to what you want to add. That might involve a father and mother on an ancestor tree or the children of one set of parents on a descendants tree. It should also preserve clickable links to source images such as census records in the original part of the Ancestry tree. Dave
  6. The import of the first tree finally completed after 133 hours. Regarding the Ancestry trees, I was able to retain clickable links to Ancestry citations by treating the Ancestry tree as primary and the FTM tree as expendable. It is possilbe to use FTM to clean up place names, though the FTM tools to do so aren't nearly as good as TMG's tools. I was able to add branches to an existing Ancestry tree through GEDCOM import.and connect it manually to existing people in the tree. I found this useful only in building a framework of birth, marriage, death, people, places and relationships to later document on Ancestry if Ancestry documentation was the intended result.
  7. If I have somehow messed up the process, that would be good to know. This started as an Ancestry tree with 26,000+ people and 180,000+ citations (clickable links to the associated census recrods, find-a-grave, social security death index, etc.) I created a new FTM 2014 tree by downloading the tree from Ancestry. I exported the FTM 2014 data in FTM 2008/2009 format so that it could be imported by TMG v9. I started the TMG v9 import specifying FTM 2008/2009 format and pointing it to the FTM 2008/2009 export. That's it. 112 hours into the import and it is 76% of the way through step 4 (finish) "importing other person information" The overall progress shown is 36%, which doesn't seem to have updated since the start of step 4, so I am hoping for something better. This is the first of several trees. Anything learned from this one might benefit later imports. This is with a fast processor (4th generation Intel I7 - the import is consistently using 25% of the CPU) with 8GB of RAM (the import is currently using 218 MB which has grown slowly from about 65MB when it started). The disk is solid state. There should be nothing hardware-wise to slow it down. It is all on one machine so there should be no network slowdown. I expect a tree of this size to take some time. I'd be OK with 3-4 hours for the import. I'd be delighted with 1-2 hours. The progress is very slow but it is still reporting progress: it hasn't locked up or stopped. Is there a way to dissect the problem and better identify what is going on? I want to speed up the process/fix the problem not jiust say "it's slow".
  8. 88 hours into the import and it is now 52% of the way through step 4 (finish) "Importing other person information" on the first tree. <sigh>
  9. 64 hours into the import and it is now 27% of the way through step 4 (finish) on the first tree. Until one can see the result it is hard to appreciate what a great job GenBridge does on the import. Perhaps some future TMG update could look into GenBridge performance. These are mostly descendant trees that start small in the late 1600s/early 1700s and grow geometrically larger toward the present. Current information in other trees tends to involve living individuals and shows only as "Private". Older information may offer clues to what happened to some child who "disappeared". Sometimes they just made it up. Sometimes they confused two people with similar names. Sometimes it looks like they got it right. Information between 1850 and 1940 tends to come from state and federal census information with some information from WW1/WW2 draft registrations, vital records, find-a-grave, city directories, etc. I hear from people who discover their parents or grandparents in one of the trees or see that I added one of the photos they posted.. In many cases I can connect them with other researchers working their lines. Dave
  10. Terry,, I get fairly regular contact on three of my Ancestry trees. The others not so much. One problem with the Ancestry-FTM link is that the link sometimes becomes corrupt. I susect it occurs when one person appears in two d ifferent places in the tree and I modify the relationships to eliminate one of them. There may be other circumstances. In any event one time when it became corrupt I deleted the Ancestry tree and reloaded it from FTM. In the process, every last link to census records, etc.in the ttree stopped being clickable and 10,000+ "new" Ancestry hints popped up. After that I would only delete the FTM copy so retain the clickable links to images of the source documents on Ancestry. I have used GEDcom to uplad to Ancestry. If I want clickable links to source documents it worked better to upload the GEDcom without source information then document it on Ancestry: It is still quite tedious on a large tree but it sames much of the clean up once it is documented. I'd have much more flexibility with my own web site. Second Site looks promising. I used GedHTree for that purpose a number of years ago. Dave
  11. 40 hours into the import it is 2% of the way through step 4 (finish) on the first tree. I use FTM just to clean up data in trees I maintain on Ancestry.com. In this case I created the FTM tree by linking to Ancestry.com immediately before the export to FTM 2008/2009 which was immediately before I began the import to TMG. It seems odd to pack the FTM database given no activity in it, but I try that with the next tree. Thanks. For the Ancestry.com - FTM 2012/2014 process to maintain clickable links to source images I needed to think of the Ancestry.com tree as primary and the FTM tree as expendable. Given the time it takes to import, I likely need to think of the TMG tree as primary and look for another way to make the results available on the web. Just as well.
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