While investigating an issue with Ancestry hints brought up by Russ Worthington in a comment on the Genea-Musings blog post, “When Did Ancestry.com Last Index Ancestry Member Trees?” I discovered ‘Unsourced Citations’ on Ancestry.
These ‘Unsourced Citations’ appeared in a small tree created by uploaded a gedcom file to Ancestry and then using TreeShare to bring the tree down into RootsMagic.
When I looked at the event in RootsMagic, there were sources attached.
The sources are complete.
Upon further investigation, I found that these ‘unsourced citations’ were the Notes attached to an event.
Since my tree was created by uploading a gedcom file, I looked back at the gedcom export screen and found that I had included the Notes in the gedcom export.
Thus, the source of the ‘Unsourced Citations’ are the Notes attached to an individual event.
Why do those notes transfer to Ancestry (via gedcom) as a citation?
The answer to your question is that “you added a Note to a Fact and Ancestry didn’t know where to put it, so they created a “unsourced” citation for it.
When you TreeShare from RootsMagic to Ancestry, the Note is included in the source citation “Citation Details” section under “Transcript.”
That’s where that Note belongs. But GEDCOM is older and they didn’t think of that when they programmed the GEDCOM upload.
My newest tree was a TreeShare upload so the Note went into the “Citation Detail transcript. My older trees went up through Family Tree Maker put the Note in the same place.
Thanks Randy!
I figured it was a gedcom issue — especially since I’m fairly ignorant about the specs for a gedcom file and the way it transfers data.
I tried creating a tree in RM but wasn’t able to upload that new tree to Ancestry. Somehow, my new tree was tied to my main tree in TreeShare. Since I didn’t want to disconnect my main tree, I resorted to gedcom.
Would you consider deleting those unsourced portions? It is distracting to me?
Vicki Roberts – Those unsourced citations only appear on a small test tree. They do not appear on my main tree: Heartland Genealogy. See Mary Foster on my main tree: https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/115166653/person/270137689813/facts
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