I could delete the citation in RM, and then recreate it and the change would take effect in the Ancestry tree. The source did not change in the Ancestry tree. But when following the process to select the changed item then clicking on “Accept changes” did nothing. The source citation icon turned red to indicate it had been changed. It was during this process that I discovered that changes made to a source or citation did not automatically update the Ancestry tree source or citation when opening “TreeShare for Ancestry” window. In order to determine how TreeShare performs source and citation transfers, numerous changes to the source templates and the text used in the fields were required. Long citations are now truncated at the 256 character limit, leaving out a lot of important information. This is a problem for many citations, particularly ones for sources found on websites that require a layered citation to additionally identify the original information, the website information, and often the source-of-the-source information. There is also a limit of 256 characters transferred for the citation. The citation is then transferred to the Ancestry tree in the “Other Sources” box under the headings “Citation Information” and “Detail”. Semicolons are only used between the layers. For an EE style citation, these separate pieces of information are separated by commas. This is a problem when source templates are set up with separate citation fields for the original item of interest, page number, line number, website author, database name, date accessed, image number, source-of-the-source, etc. Instead, citation fields from the RM source template are combined sequentially as they are defined in the template, separating each field with semicolons. None of the punctuation or extra words and characters defined in the source template are transferred. It would seem intuitive that the citation should be handled the same way as the source, which is not the case. It appears that the text for the citation portion of the full footnote created from the RM source template is not being used in the transfer to an Ancestry tree through TreeShare. Characters “” appear to be the only ones where this happens. It appears that those characters pass through TreeShare, and then Ancestry strips them. Special keyboard characters “” in field text appear to be transferred to the “Other Sources” box on the Ancestry tree person view, but when expanding the box, those special characters are removed from the “Source Information - Title” heading. Simple switches to fill in default text for fields left blank are working properly. It is not necessary to include that information as part of the field text data. Text formatting for italics, bold, or underlining is not done, however punctuation, extra words, and characters outside of the fields that are part of the source template are transferred. There is a limit of 256 characters transferred for the title. Text for the source portion of the full footnote created from the RM source template appears to be transferred directly to the Ancestry tree in the “Other Sources” box under the headings “Source Information” and “Title”. So, I have experimented heavily and have discovered some interesting issues that shed light on why I have had trouble. I received responses from one individual, which has led me to believe there are probably a lot of other users like me, who don’t fully understand how information is being transferred. I posted a question to the Community asking if anyone knew how source/citation fields from RM mapped to the source/citations found in Ancestry trees, thinking that someone knew how the two were linked. I have not attempted to upload Ancestry developed source/citations directly into my RM files, as some of them are quite inadequate. My goal has been to use TreeShare to post my research with well documented sources (hopefully) to Ancestry. However, I have been having difficulty getting them to transfer acceptably to Ancestry trees via TreeShare. Creating source templates that follow the layered approach guidelines described in Evidence Explained (EE) by author Elizabeth Shown Mills have been relatively straightforward to create in RootsMagic.
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