Steve Hayes <[email protected]> wrote: >On Fri, 10 Jun 2011 22:23:47 +0000 (UTC), Todd Carnes <[email protected]> >wrote: > >>On Fri, 10 Jun 2011 20:55:46 +0200, Steve Hayes wrote: >> >>> Some people seem to only keep their family history information on such >>> sites, and when I ask if we can share and compare information, they >>> offer access to their online tree, where there seems to be no >>> possibility of sharing GEDCOM files. Is it really as bad as it looks, or >>> am I missing something important? >> >>Ancestry.com has the ability to import and/or export via gedcom files, >>but most people don't seem to realize that. >> >>HOWEVER, having said that, the gedcom you get from Ancestry.com when you >>do an export is NOT clean. By that, I mean it has a lot of non-standard >>junk in it that either gets thrown away or ends up polluting your notes >>when you import it into a "real" genealogy program. >> >>But gedcoms CAN be done on Ancestry.com. > >Do you know how? > >Would you care to share your knowledge? You can do so for your own tree. Not someone else's. The following is for ancestry - I don't know how it might work under Mundia. If you have owner privileges for a tree, then the menu bar for ancestry has a drop down tab "family trees" just to the right of the "Home" tab. If you hover over it, it lists all your owned trees as well as others that you have been linked to by invitation, followed by "Start a new tree" and then "Upload a GEDCOM", which should be self-explanatory. If you use Legacy 7.5, the File menu has an "upload to Ancestry On Line Family Tree" which is what I use and know it is self explanatory. If you click on the dropdown tab itself, you get a screen with a list of your owned trees. For each tree you can view the tree, manage the tree, or invite people to access the tree (necessary to give selective access to others for your private tree, or to give someone else the ability to edit your tree). If you click on "manage tree" then the new screen allows you to change the name and description of the tree, select the home person for the tree, identify who you are in the tree, delete the tree irrevocably, or export the tree to a GEDCOM on your computer. >You can't even find whether the person who compiled the tree is actually >related to the family you are looking for, That is up to the person who compiled the tree. >or whether that have compiled the >material from their own research, or just copied and pasted from someone >else's tree. Copy and paste IS a form of research. Just not the most valuable to others, unless you are copying from things that others do not have ready access to. >You see this list of trees that all have things like "10472 >individuals" - so which one is the original and which ones are the copies? Why would it matter? The data is the same. >There is no point in trying to make contact with the "owner" of a tree that is >apparently exactly the same as five or six others if they have just copied the >whole thing and havent done the research. The obvious thing to do is to ASK them. The whole point of a social-network based genealogy system is to get people communicating, not just looking at other people's data and trying to read their mind to determine why they entered what they did before copying it. Ancestry has been trying to felicitate cooperative genealogy for years, not generally with much success. Older trees and those created solely by massive GEDCOM uploads (that frequently do not specify sources) will tend not to be designed for use by others. On the other hand, if the Mundia tree resembles the current Ancestry Public Tree, then there is a "facts and sources" tab on the profile which records whatever sources you have identified. If you copied a tree, it presumably would show that as a source. If it shows no sources at all, then take the data with the usual barrel of salt. Assuming that you can see the full range of ancestry trees, one of my trees is named "Burgess28" (I'm not the owner, but I did the work). It is essentially an upload of a Legacy tree, and has all the sources that I added via Legacy, insofar as ancestry was able to interpret the GEDCOM. I am not in the tree, and the "home person" is the tree owner, who because he is living is probably not visible except as a surname. lojbab --- Bob LeChevalier - artificial linguist; genealogist [email protected] Lojban language www.lojban.org

On Sat, 18 Jun 2011 09:15:09 -0400, Bob LeChevalier <[email protected]> wrote: >Steve Hayes <[email protected]> wrote: >>You see this list of trees that all have things like "10472 >>individuals" - so which one is the original and which ones are the copies? > >Why would it matter? The data is the same. And the errors are the same and the unexplained sources are the same. And you need to find the first person who entered the data , rather than those who just mindlessly copied and pasted it, which they made A sn B the parents of C, rather than D and E, and what sources they used. >>There is no point in trying to make contact with the "owner" of a tree that is >>apparently exactly the same as five or six others if they have just copied the >>whole thing and havent done the research. > >The obvious thing to do is to ASK them. The whole point of a >social-network based genealogy system is to get people communicating, >not just looking at other people's data and trying to read their mind >to determine why they entered what they did before copying it. >Ancestry has been trying to felicitate cooperative genealogy for >years, not generally with much success. Older trees and those created >solely by massive GEDCOM uploads (that frequently do not specify >sources) will tend not to be designed for use by others. And that is precidely the thing that Mundia makes so difficult. If it made that easier, I might take it more serriously. -- Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk