Gedcoms -A word of advice to my fellow newbies

Question

I uploaded a large gedcom (big mistake) and had numerous automatically determined matches which I dutifully reviewed. When the parents of a match were the same as those in my profile I did as instructed and selected the "Ancestor" and "Descendant" option. That made a whole lot of skips on profiles that had not been automatically identified. This is done to prevent a lot of duplicates.

The problem with that was that since I accepted all those skips without further thought, it deleted numerous profiles from my file even though there were no matches.It also created numerous disconnects in the family lines. I am now busily finding and restoring these.

What I learned from this is:

1.Upload in small bites. (as they suggested)

2. Do a manual search on each of the skips that the "Ancestor" and "Descendants" options created before accepting  the skip.

Answer 1

You are a wise man...too bad wisdom comes from experience. I have great empathy...been there did that.

Comments

Me too. And now nearly a year later I'm still occasionally stumbling across a profile or two that reminds me of how poorly that import went. Live and learn. It is correctable, but sometimes I wonder if simply manually adding them one at a time wouldn't have been more efficient.

Answer 2

Thank you so much for the advice.  I'm a newby and still learning the ropes.  I have done loads of research on Familysearch but new to Wikitree and Gedcoms