Introduction
Many Family Historian users upload copies of their family tree to web-based genealogy platforms, both for public visibility and convenient searching of the platform’s records. This usually starts with a GEDCOM export from Family Historian, and if you want a detailed tree on Ancestry, complete with all your media, sources, and other information, the Export GEDCOM File plugin is ideal for this purpose.
However, there are additional challenges if you want to exploit Ancestry hints, as each new upload is regarded as a new tree. This resets hint generation, losing the record of which have already been reviewed. While updating the Ancestry tree manually is possible for relatively small trees with infrequent changes, this is impractical for larger trees that change frequently.
The only way to achieve automatic synchronisation with Ancestry from Family Historian is via use of an alternative application as an intermediate, and upload from there. The TreeShare feature built into the full version of RootsMagic 9 provides this functionality, and is particularly suitable as Family Historian is able to read and (partially) write directly to RootsMagic files, enabling the two applications to be kept in sync much more reliably than would be possible relying solely on GEDCOM file export and import. Note that the free “Essentials” versions of RootsMagic can be used to create an Ancestry tree from a Family Historian export as a one-off exercise, but cannot either update the tree from Family Historian, or synchronize changes with Ancestry.
While TreeShare supports limited two-way synchronization between RootsMagic and Ancestry (so can copy updates made within Ancestry back to RootsMagic), this plugin is one-way synchronization only. This ensures that Family Historian remains the master copy of your data and avoids any potential issues with data corruption by other apps.
IMPORTANT NOTE: RootsMagic have announced recently that TreeShare is no longer supported in versions 7 or 8 as it is not compatible with the Two Factor Authentication introduced by Ancestry.
Process Overview
TreeShare does not support linking an existing Ancestry tree and existing RootsMagic database. This means that it is not possible to simply repeat this process after making changes to your tree in Family Historian, and overwrite the old RootsMagic tree with a new import. Instead, we have to update the existing RootsMagic database by merging a fresh GEDCOM export from Family Historian.
It would be too complex to create a RootsMagic database from scratch directly from Family Historian, so data transfer is carried out via a GEDCOM file. Once this is imported into RootsMagic, Family Historian processes the RootsMagic file to remove the errors and inconsistencies that inevitably arise from GEDCOM transfer to ensure that it is an exact copy of the corresponding data in Family Historian prior to being uploaded to Ancestry.
The overall process for creating a fresh tree in RootsMagic is shown in the following graphic:
Subsequent updating of that tree in RootsMagic and on Ancestry follows a similar process with additional steps:
The plugin interface, below, provides all the options needed to maintain a synchronized tree extract on Ancestry.
The Links frame in the menu identifies the RootsMagic file that the current project is linked to. Move the mouse cursor over the file name to get a pop-up description of the full file path. The Linked Ancestry tree provides a direct hyperlink to the linked tree on Ancestry (note that the demonstration tree shown here is stored on Ancestry as a private and unindexed tree purely for test purposes, so you will not be able to view it).
The details of how to set up the initial RootsMagic file and Ancestry tree and keep it synchronized with Family Historian are given in the linked help page, below.
From time to time, it is advisable to audit your Ancestry tree to ensure that it remains in sync with Family Historian, and any errors introduced by either RootsMagic or Ancestry limitations are corrected. Details of this operation are provided in the linked help page, below.
Note on Merging Records
The key to matching individuals between Family Historian and RootsMagic is the UniqueID field, which provides an unambiguous means of identifying the same individual in different applications. Family Historian permits multiple values for the UniqueID field as a result of merging different records (as supported by GEDCOM 7), but RootsMagic does not. It is therefore inadvisable to merge Individuals with different UniqueID values, as this can disrupt the identification of that individual in the linked database.
Plugin Ancestry Synchronization
Help content on this page is owned and provided by Mark Draper, the plugin's author, Calico Pie takes no responsibility for its content.