Possible FTM issues

[jorghes]

I've noticed recently a growing number of issues either on FTM, or on Ancestry or between the two. I haven't quite figured out what is going on.

However, the issues are as follows:
- randomly a bunch of people on my tree will be duplicated - can be up to 20-30 individuals. There is no warning to the duplication, and I only find out that they have been duplicate if I notice two individuals suddenly are there, or if I get a random number of hints for people I have already "cleared".

- often, there is also a random time when one of the two will change my root person on my tree to someone random in the tree. There is no warning of it being changed and I usually only find out when I hit the "home" button to go back!

The final, and strangest thing that has happened is that somehow, one of my people has turned into a "ghost"! - On FTM, he's there, with birth/death, name correctly appearing etc... but on Ancestry he is a grey blanked out box. No gender, no name, no birth, no death, no facts at all. I can't figure out what has happened!

Anyone else getting these issues?

 

[PhilGee]

Do these changes happen after the trees sync? Because of the way I update trees - I create a new GEDCOM file, merge that into the FTM tree and sync the result. However, the merge is unreliable as it can duplicate sub-trees as you describe, even if a new tree is created and the same file then merged in . You can guarantee that census records and "Lostcousins" events are duplicated.

I don't recall seeing the other events.

Phil

 

[jorghes]

They can - not always though, which is why I can't pin it down to a specific issue. And it's not the events that duplicate - it's the people.

I've attempted merging before and that's way worse - even when you slowly and meticulously go through every match and merge everything, in the end you have a whole heap of sources attached to the wrong people, seemingly for no reason, and the only way you find that is finding a list of 20-30 names attached to a single attachment of someone's WWI service. I still haven't found all the errors from the last time I merged a branch of a tree to help up date another tree. (Plus all the random duplicate births, marriages, deaths, census entries and people). I make all my Lost Cousins facts "private" on FTM, so luckily they never duplicate, nor sync.

But no. Sometimes, for weeks on end, there is no problem with the syncing and no random duplicate people. Then all of a sudden I have 30 duplicates on my tree and a rash of random hints that I have already done, and I have to spend time merging them all again and even then sometimes their census data duplicates... and then a little later I find that either FTM or Ancestry has "re-assigned" my root person.

Erg.