Re: [Gramps] [Help] GetMyAncestors : a standalone tool to export FamilySearch ancestors

Just for grins, I used GetMyAncestors to download a small group of 14  people in three generations.  There was exactly one person in the group who intersected my data.  The download worked.  That's a pretty cool program!  A lot of effort went into it.

But the result was far less than useful.  When I examined the GEDCOM file, there were problems with ratty data.  StoltHD mentioned place names.  If I had imported this file, it would have created a bunch of duplicate place names.  Finding and cleaning that up would take several hours.  There were some place names that were just plain wrong, such as "Glamorgan, Wales, United Kingdom".  The United Kingdom did not exist in the early 17th century.

Some of the date formats were weird, such as "Abt 1610" which would have to be found and corrected.  I would have had to visit every person's profile anyway so I could get their Family Search ID and a URL pointing to the profile.  Some of them have Find a Grave links that I would have had to manually edit to get into a form I like.

The sources and notes came through reasonably well, though not in a form that I find useful.

The one common person would be a duplicate that I would have to merge and then clean up.  Doing that for exactly one person is not a big deal.  If there had been more overlap, then more duplicate persons would have to be found, merged and edited.

I wound up not importing the GEDCOM file.  I entered those 14 people using my regular workflow.  It took about an hour.

One thought I had was to import the GEDCOM to a brand new Gramps database, clean it up there and then export to my real database via an XML file.  The problem with that is place names.  I would need an exact duplicate of the places data in the new database.  The place ID numbers would have to match up, else when importing it would create all new place names.  I don't think there is a way to get an exact copy of the places data.

========
Bill Gee


On Sunday, December 12, 2021 10:58:33 PM CST StoltHD via The Gramps Project (Discourse Forum & Mailing List) wrote:
> 
> [quote="bgee, post:25, topic:2011"]
> As a general observation, a tool like this may not be nearly as useful as it first seems. I am reminded of the last time I tried to do voice recognition to type an email. It took me more time to find and correct the mistakes than simply typing the message would have taken. It was not a win. Family Search is so full of errors and mistakes that I think any attempt to use an export of their data is doomed to have the same problem
> [/quote]
> 
> I think the tool can be of some help, when you set a specific individual and limit the ancestors and descendents, but yes, I agree, I don't think it will be useful for much other scenarios other than if you have found some individuals with a lot of sources on FS.
> 
> Another thing is that when you use a tool like this, you need to accept the format given by the tool, for names on people, places and sources that is set at FS, and I know that a lot of both names on both individuals and places there has been transcoded and translated totally wrong. so as you say, the cleanup of the data can be a larger job than writing it manually of you try to batch import a lot of people...
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