Thus you need your genealogy program to select spouses as well. Your sibling’s kids would be chosen, but they would be missing a parent since strictly speaking that spouse is not your blood relative. If you only had the program select your actual relatives, your sibling’s spouse would not be chosen. The issue of the spouses, by the way, is a simple one. The important thing here is that while most genealogy programs will let you select all your relatives (and their spouses), it’s not so simple to select your relatives and delete everyone else. While my initial guess about that GEDCOM file was correct, and it was indeed the source of most of the incorrect records, I also discovered something else interesting – that there were other people in my family tree that were not related to me, some of them that I wanted to keep. I obviously forgot to do this with this particular file a few years back, and ended up with about 300 extra people in my tree that I was not related to, which was what was causing these false hits in the matching program (technically they’re not false hits, okay, but from my perspective they’re just as annoying even if they are my fault).Īfter receiving quite enough of these messages from the web site I decided it was time to remove the incorrect records from my family tree file. When you receive a GEDCOM from someone else, you should also check it out, create a test file where you import it, add yourself to the file, and then see if everyone in the file is related to you. This insures the person doesn’t get a lot of records that are not relevant to them. When I share a tree with someone, I usually only export those people who are related to the person I’m sending the tree to, plus spouses. It illustrated to me that when I imported a tree from a relative a couple of years ago I did not properly check out the tree first. I recently uploaded a family tree to one of these web sites and started getting matches to people not related to me. Following up these false leads is a big waste of time. Moreover, if you upload your family tree to a site like or where they can do some form of automatic matching between your tree and other trees as well as with records on the site, you’re going to get all kinds of matches for people who are not actually related to you. If you get a GEDCOM file from a relative with 2000 people in it and only 200 of them are actually related to you, you’ve just added 1800 that are irrelevant to your tree. There are a number of reasons that bad information can enter your tree, but the most common and most problematic is when you import a GEDCOM from a relative without checking first to see if everyone in the tree is actually related to you. You might have needed, for example, to support what is now an obsolete computer platform at one point, but the code for that shouldn’t still be in your program today.įamily trees also accumulate cruft over time, and just like in computer programs those extra people and extra information can slow you down. Cruft is the stuff you added at one point that might have been important then, but is now irrelevant, and worse it causes the rest of your program to slow down. But I’d hate to wade through the contracts, penalty clauses & payola involved.Cruft is a term used in computer programming circles to mean the useless code in a computer program that accumulate over time. They DO have commercial agreements with some partners. With an estimated 3 million customers paying $25-$50 per month (many at promotional discount rates), they’d be darn foolish to make it too easy to harvest the data and cut that revenue stream. I don’t expect Ancestry to be anthing but jerks about this… to the point of slapping violators (& enabling tech providers) with punitive lawsuits. So long as it isn’t done with a tool the violates their T&C. Although, you might use them to point you in the direction of the data source … where you can acquire usage rights without their highly restrictive overlay. I, for one, recommend NEVER passing data through Ancestry. In essence, any material sourced through Ancestry cannot be freely re-distributed.Įven if you choose to upload exclusively owned media to Ancestry and then download for import elsewhere, you have agreed to overlay their terms & conditions on that fork of digital property. To build-in such a datascraper feature (that you suggest should already exist) would require an extravagant provenance tracking system & copyright compliance system. Gramps respects copyrights, even Ancestry’s onerously broad ones.
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