Ancestry.com Thoughts

Cleanup from Ancestry.com #1

I don’t know how many of you, like me, use Ancestry.com as their data collection and ‘easy analysis’ site.  I suspect quite a few.

researchAs you may be aware I have been pouring through a significant section of my father’s family- the Deyos.  This research effort has generated a set of over 500 people.  Also because the research is about 90% in Quebec, that means there is a lot of overlap in that portion of my family tree.  People are cross-related numerous times over; in my case there are about 5 junctions.  This brings me to my point… Ancestry.com does not deal with overlapping, repeating family lines very well at all; or if it does, I don’t know or understand how.

For my purposes, this means I need to perform the following tasks before I even can consider publication or archiving my data:

  • Merging repeating family lines
  • Merging and simplifying ‘Places’
  • Merging and simplifying Sources
  • Merging duplicate People, yes Ancestry allows people to be duplicated, triplicated, quadruplicated…
  • Downloading Ancestry “Media”- images, documents, etc.

Each of these ‘essential’ tasks appear to be either unsupported or not offered by the standard Ancestry.com online system; perhaps these features are offered by their commercial Windows based PC application, I don’t know.

The bottom line is that users of Ancestry.com are in for a significant manual and off-line effort when attempting to clean-up their files.

In my next post, I’ll cover the tools I used to address these issues. If you have ways of dealing with these problems and wish to share them, please post a comment or use or Contact form to let me know, and I’ll publish your ideas.

ManyRoads Creator, Professional Genealogist, Family Historian, ManyRoads Podcast co-host, Old Guy and most importantly 'opa'