Many of our historical records on Ancestry have information in them about other members of the family—not just the one person. Previously when you saved a record, you could only save it to one person at a time, and if the record had information about other family members, you would have to find each of their individual records and save them one at a time.

Starting today when you find a record with family information, you can save and merge that record to multiple members of the household.

Is there a way to go back to hints you have previously accepted and re-merge those? Yes—last week we added a section to the list of hints for a person which now shows hints that have previously been accepted.

Merging responsibly

Now before you go off merging family information all willy nilly, please merge responsibly. The default selection on this new merge feature does NOT include the extra family members. This is so you can review them individually and be certain that they are a right match before you add them to your tree. As smart as our system is, it can still make mistakes and can occasionally recommend a merge of two wrongly matched people, or perhaps a merge that results in duplicate names in your family tree.

Give us your Feedback

So, how do you like this feature? Does it work well for you? What recommendations do you have? Please let us know how you like it. You can post a comment here, or if you prefer, feel free to send me an email directly (kfreestone at tgn.com).

An unfortunate side affect of this work is that a few features of the system will be down for (we anticipate) a few days while we get everything caught up with new changes. During this time you won’t be receiving the “new content added” emails, and the updates to your trees won’t reflect in our search system.

We apologize for this delay, and hope to get it back up and running quickly!

Here’s the conference details:

2008 National Genealogical Society Conference
Kansas City, Missouri, 14 - 17 May 2008
http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/

This is remarkable especially considering the relatively short time frame we’ve been at this–about 19 months. During that time, more than 4.5 million people have created a family tree, more than 7 million photos have been uploaded, and more than 1 million family members have been invited to help build the family tree.

70 million historical records have been attached to those 500 million names, with more than half of those the result of an Ancestry Hint.

It is incredibly exciting to watch this unfold as all of us collectively create an amazing linkage of family histories–records, photos, names, dates, places, relationships, all being connected and grouped. While the individual names are priceless to those family members finding them (so is seeing an ancestor’s photo for the first time, as has happened to me!), the millions (and billions) of connection points that are being made is truly remarkable.

Thanks for making it happen.

Have you found a name, record, photo, story, or other information that has been memorable? Leave a comment or send me an email (kfreestone at tgn.com). We’d love to hear your story.

Thanks to all of you who have written, or emailed, or have otherwise given us feedback on these pages. Now that they’re up, please don’t stop! Leave a comment or send me an email (kfreestone at tgn.com) to let us know how these new pages and features are working out for you and your research–we love hearing from you.

We’re doing this because we are adding increased capacity to the portion of our system that enables Ancestry Hints. We also expect this project to improve the speed of the overall trees service. We have been slower than we like to be lately, and expect this (and other in-progress efforts) to give us a dramatic improvement in the speed and capacity of our trees service.

This tree service downtime will affect Member Trees, OneWorldTree, some portions of Ancestry Press, the sections of My Ancestry that are related to Member Trees, and the sections of MyFamily.com 2.0 that are related to Member Trees.

We apologize for the downtime.

I’ve posted your questions and concerns (sometimes paraphrased) in bold below, with my answer or thoughts below it.

Which system am I using? Do I need to do anything?

A previous post will help clarify which system you are using. (Click to see this post.) If you’ve started a tree on Ancestry in the last 18 months, odds are that it is in the new system, and you don’t need to migrate.

My transferred trees have multiple missing connections

We’ve just recently been able to replicate this issue, and identify what causes it to occur. It is an unusual thing, but not as rare as we would hope. Our thanks to those who have sent us information to help us reproduce the issue.

So, it is a bug we’re working to address. The bug is that in a minority (appears to be up to 30%) of Online Family Tree GEDCOM exports, the GEDCOM data is not formatted correctly. We did not see this in our testing. We do have a solution in mind, but expect it will take several days to fix and test.

So, if your tree is one that appears to have missing family information, please be patient while we fix this bug. I’ll post to the blog when we have it corrected. You will be able to re-initiate a migration. I recommend that you do not manually delete your Online Family Tree file after transitioning to the new Ancestry Member Tree system. The transition process itself does NOT delete the file.

What about the notes I have in my Online Family Tree file?

I believe there are two chief concerns with imported notes:

• The notes section is still there, but you have to “click several times to find the notes box”
• Notes are visible only to the “owner” or to designated “editors” of the file

So, yes, the notes are still there. They are in the “research notes” section after you click the “edit person” button.

It is pretty clear those of you who have used OFT extensively use notes differently than is common in Ancestry Member Trees, where this type of information is often kept as stories or comments.

We originally implemented notes as “private”, because we didn’t have time to create a more flexible system, and knowing that some notes are very personal, we choose to default all notes to “private.” It is clear from your comments that a choice in this would be very much appreciated.

Perhaps on a GEDCOM or OFT file import, we could offer a choice to make notes private or public.

It also is clear that you would like the notes to be much more visible. One solution might be to have all public notes appear in the “stories” section, rather than the existing “research notes” section.

We’re very open to your feedback on this topic, and look forward to making this work better for you.

Will this continue to be a free feature? Or will everyone have to have a paid membership to use this?

Your family tree in the Ancestry Member Tree system is FREE for you and all your invited guests. (Others who want to search your tree must have a paid subscription in order to do so.)

Some related Ancestry.com features, such as viewing and attaching historical records to your tree, require a paid subscription. But you are free to ignore all paid features on the site.

Now will you please make a similar announcement about OneWorldTree, and retire that infected dinosaur?

No, not yet, or perhaps not at all. We consider this option all the time and have mixed thoughts and feelings as to what to do with OneWorldTree. For many, many customers, it is a wonderful resource. For some, it is an “infected dinosaur”. Our hope is to improve it in a way that those who value it can continue getting that value in a way that everyone can be content with.

Has Ancestery.com lost all common sense? If this was a contest to see who could upset the most customers in the shortest space of time, Ancestry would surely have won it by a mile.

We totally get it that many of you are bitterly disappointed with this announcement. At the same time we are very, very grateful for those who give feedback, help us track down bugs, offer suggestions for improvement, etc. and who are willing to work with us to make the new system work well for everyone.

We have 3 months to make this work. If it is not going to work for the vast majority of users, we can extend that time. We can be flexible. But we do need to move towards turning off the OFT system. It is old, and we are not willing to maintain two systems. We’re putting all our available efforts into the Ancestry Member Trees system, and will make it the best we can for you.

Before making this announcement we surveyed about seven thousand highly active users of the Online Family Tree system, and about 25% of those surveyed replied.

survey results

We learned that this transition would be a challenge for many users, and have done all we can to make it simple and user-controlled (rather than, say, force an automatic migration). We also learned that about 4% would berate us for this decision. We want to do all we can to win this group over, and recognize that doing so will take time, good communication, and cooperation from all of us.

What about Ancestry World Tree and World Connect?

I also hear a major frustration that is more about using Ancestry World Tree, rather than just the Online Family Tree system.

Online Family Tree has acted as a shortcut to submitting files to Ancestry World Tree.

(Ancestry World Tree is a free database of GEDCOM files submitted either from the Online Family Tree system, or from the Rootsweb World Connect system. Ancestry World Tree and World Connect are in fact the same database. On the Ancestry.com website, the database is referred to as “Ancestry World Tree”. On the Rootsweb.com website, the database is called “World Connect”)

Family tree files submitted or created using the Ancestry Member Tree system are not shared with the Rootsweb World Connect project. Today we have no plans to automate this process, or create a shortcut option.

To submit your file to the Ancestry World Tree database, please visit our sister site Rootsweb.com and submit your file to the World Connect system.

If you have comments, questions or concerns about any of this, I encourage you to post those to the blog, or please feel free to email me directly if you like: kfreestone at tgn.com.

12.26.2007 note: I notice some concern about the safety of this migration process. The transfer is safe, because it is non-destructive, meaning your existing Online Family Tree file remains unchanged and unmoved and essentially untouched in this process.

When you request the transfer, our system triggers an “export GEDCOM” request on the Online Family Tree file. The original file is untouched, and a separate, new copy of your file is created in GEDCOM format. We then take this new GEDCOM file and import it into the Ancesty Member Trees system.

When this is complete, you now have two files. Your original Online Family Tree file remains exactly as it was. And you also have a new Ancestry Member Tree file.

GEDCOM is the standard format for transferring family tree data. If for some reason your tree contains information that doesn’t work with this standard, we may have difficulty transitioning your tree. However, that would be a rare situation. We’ll also transfer your list of invited guests into the new Ancestry Member Tree system.

Here are the known issues:

1. Online Family Tree files with single quote character (’) in the title can’t transition

If you have a tree name that contains a single quote character (‘), it will not move to the new system correctly. To work around this issue, click on the info icon ( ) on the My Ancestry page and change your tree name to remove the single quote. Click “Change Name” to save. Then do the “Move to the Ancestry Member Tree system”. In the “Move your Online Family Tree to Ancestry Member Trees” dialog, you can specify the name of the tree in the new system to be the original name with the single quote if you so desire. (01.04.08 update: This issue has been fixed. If you were affected by it, you should be able to migrate now and not experience this error.)

2. Making additional changes to your file during the transition causes the transition to fail

If you modify the tree in Online Family Tree while you are waiting for it to move to the new system, the move will fail. To work around this issue, do not make any changes to the OFT tree while the move is in progress.  (01.23.08 update: This issue has been fixed. If you were affected by it, you should be able to migrate now and not experience this error.)

3. Having lots of people invited to your Online Family Tree file may cause the transition to fail

If there are more than 15 invitees to your tree, the move may fail. To work around this issue, in the dialog “Move your Online Family Tree to Ancestry Member Trees”, un-check the box that says, “Re-invite those I’ve invited to my tree.” Then after the tree has moved to the new system, click on the tree in the new system, click “Manage Tree”, and click on (invite others to see your tree). You can then manually invite people to your new tree. (01.04.08 update: This issue has been fixed. If you were affected by it, you should be able to migrate now and not experience this error.)

4. Some transitioned files have missing connections or people (added 12.26.2007)

We’ve just recently been able to replicate this issue, and identify what causes it to occur. It is an unusual thing, but not as rare as we would hope. Our thanks to those who have sent us information to help us reproduce the issue.

So, it is a bug we’re working to address. The bug is that in a minority (appears to be up to 30%) of Online Family Tree GEDCOM exports, the GEDCOM data is not formatted correctly. We did not see this in our testing. We do have a solution in mind, but expect it will take several days to fix and test.

So, if your tree is one that appears to have missing family information, please be patient while we fix this bug. I’ll post to the blog when we have it corrected. You will be able to re-initiate a migration. I recommend that you do not manually delete your Online Family Tree file after transitioning to the new Ancestry Member Tree system. The transition process itself does NOT delete the file. (01.02.08 update: This issue has been fixed. If you were affected by it, your original Online Family Tree file can be migrated again this time without the error)

5. When an Online Family Tree file has notes on a person AND also on a citation for that person, the two notes are combined in the Ancestry Member Tree file in the citation field. (added 01.04.2008)

We’re working on a fix for this, and hope to have it fixed shortly.  (01.23.08 update: This issue has been fixed. If you were affected by it, you should be able to migrate now and not experience this error.)

As more known issues are discovered, I’ll add them to this list.

If you come across errors with your file transitioning, please help us investigate by sending an e-mail to me (kfreestone at tgn.com) with the OFT tree name, your Ancestry user name, and a detailed description of the problem.

Please note that we have NO known cases of data being permanently lost in any transition for any customer. If you feel you have lost data, please let me know. We absolutely realize that holding your many years worth of research in our system is a sacred trust, and are fully committed to preserving your data safely and securely.