Hello everyone! I’m new to geneology and inherited a substantial database from my mother-in-law. It came from Ancestry so I just got a gedcom file that they had backed up and didn’t include any media. I’ve search the forum trying to find some answers but not having much luck.
It seems others have tried, but is there not a way to get the media files from Ancestry.com?
When entering data are there some guidelines to follow? I’ve watched the tutorials and they helped quite a bit. I’m curious about events and places, should a residence be listed as an event such as when you moved there or just as a residence. How does a location get listed on the Geography button?
I’ve also installed the PlacesCleanup addon, and I’m trying to get all the long list of places normalized like they should be, Cleanup doesn’t seem to help with merging multiple places that are similar am I missing something?
The Place Cleanup addon gramplet is good for normalizing Place hierarchical data and adding coordinates. It is also good for avoiding duplication of Place hierarchy as you recategorize a Place imported as a comma separated list. It checks for existing enclosing places rather than making another duplicate enclosure. But it is NOT good for merging duplicates that already exist.
Use the flat listPlace view mode instead of the Place Tree view mode when multi-merging. It is easier to see (and manually select) the Places that might leave out a level of the Place hierarchy. (e.g., “Pittsburgh, PA” is the same as “Pittsburgh, Allegheny, Pennsylvania, USA”) Its Automerge tab is useful when Place Titles are identical. But when you have a dozen variants of the Place Title is where the Merge Selected tab will save you much time over the built-in Edit → Merge. (Be certain to clean the “Alternative Names” afterwards!!)
To my regret there is no easy way to download media from Ancestry when you only have a GEDCOM file. Gramps has a media download add-on, but that does not work for Ancestry, because there are no web links in that GEDCOM, at least not in the one that I get, when I export it from my tree over there.
There are two programs that can download media from Ancestry, but they can only do that if you can provide a user name and password for that site, so that they can use Ancestrys own media transfer protocol. Is it possible for you to get that user name and password from your mother-in-law or her relatives?
If it is, RootsMagic 10 will do the job quite well, and that program has a free version called RootsMagic Essentials, which is available here:
You can download it without entering any data in the form that they show, and it works well in Windows 11. I use it for FamilySearch, and Ancestry, and use the exported GEDCOM files from that in Gramps. And when you use that to download the tree with media, and create a GEDCOM file from there, it will have all the media links that Gramps needs to add them to the media table.
