Importing a new GedCom, HowTo...

Question

I've imported a new gedcom and gotten the report back. After painfully going thru possible matches for Smith, I finally got everything cleaned up.

Now the Add button is visible. I "Added" my ex wife, it did not add the relationship. I added my son, it added him as a child to my current wife.

All of this information was already correct in my GedCom, I have no desire to rebuild my tree, basically from scratch for each of the 300+ people.

Am I missing something?

Comments

After reading around a bit, I believe I've discovered:

1. You cannot "Update" your tree with imported information.

2. You cannot easily expand your tree with additional Gedcom information.

I like WikiTree, please let me know if you ever decide to allow the above.

Thank you.

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Actually, I have done the above quite a lot.  I have a very detailed offline family tree that I continue to garner sources into.  If I have profiles on WikiTree that I feel could use a bit of freshening up with added sources from my offline tree, I have no qualms with uploading a new GEDCOM.  The process of bringing in individual profiles is a bit daunting with some of my larger lists, but updating profiles on WikiTree from my uploaded GEDCOMs has really been pretty easy.

When I import a GEDCOM that has profiles for people I have already imported, but has added information, I go ahead and compare the two side-by-side and copy in whatever changed biography information I have.

When you compare them, you get the option to edit the match through your GEDCOM import, with a button on the GEDCOM side that says "EDIT Name-WikiID" of the profile on the right.  Click that and you'll get a merge page which gives you the option of selecting which information to keep.  At the bottom, you can clean up the merged biography, and include only the information from your imported GEDCOM or keep the original information.  It is always important, however, to clean up your biography, and ensure that it doesn't have multiple GEDCOM imports stacked up.

As to your number two, I'm not entirely sure which branches you're referring to; I've always found it much easier to find connections to the broader tree by importing various branches through GEDCOMs and seeing what profiles already exist and matching those with them.  My connections are quite thorough, from this method.

I hope that you find the genealogy method that works best for you, whether it's here or elsewhere.  Thanks for being a part of our community!

Answer 1

Hi Barry,

Sorry to hear things are a bit bumpy for  you.    When I joined WikiTree,  I didn't upload my ancestry.com tree because I knew it wasn't a quality product (as a novice, I was a bit sloppy).   I created each profile in WikiTree,  which really allowed me to become familiar with the software.  Three years later I've still got a lot to learn and I've created at least 1500 profiles.   It just sort of happens.

If you don't have the energy to put all 300 profiles in,  at least input your first 4 generations (there's the possibility some of them are already created for  you)..... eventually someone else will input others for you.  You'll be amazed at the flexibility WikiTree gives you to upload photos and documents and write a great biography for those ancestors closest to  you.  

It became important to me to put my ancestors who were Civil War soldiers into categories that grouped them with the other soldiers in their units.   I've used numerous other WikiTree categories too.

I don't say it will be simple  but all great products require an effort.  And there's lots of G2G help for you along the way.

Best of Luck.