Synchronizing Your Tree With Ancestry to Exploit Hints

Introduction

Many ƒh 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 synchronization 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 versions (but not the stripped down Essentials versions) of  RootsMagic 7 and later 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.

Process Overview

The synchronization process is driven by the Ancestry Synchronization plugin, now available in the Plugin Store. Full details are given in the plugin help.

Last update: 07 Apr 2024