Do you have a tree on Geneanet? Have you ever thought of that tree as a backup of your geenalogy research? I know that I never had that thought before reading the post, Four Ways to Safeguard Your Family Tree, on Fortify Your Family Tree.
In that post, it was suggested to use one’s genealogy software to create a GedCom file and upload it to Geneanet as a Family Tree. The author does this on a daily basis as one of the 4 ways they ‘backup’ their geneology research.
While I use software called Second Copy to copy my RootsMagic file from my local drive to Dropbox and to a USB drive on a daily basis, I had never considered using Geneanet to create another backup. So I decided to experiment with this to see how easy it would be to do this on a daily (or weekly) basis.
In my RootsMagic software, I clicked on FILE to disply my options.
Clicking on EXPORT DATA opens the EPORT DATA list of options.
After selecting GEDCOM File, I was prompted to pick the location and file name for my GedCom file.
Once I had selected the location and name for the file, the window opened to select what was to be included in the GedCom file.
While I could have selected all of the data types to include, I only selected Notes and Sources. Because this will become a public tree on Geneanet, I PRIVATIZED the living people’s name and elected to NOT include their facts. Whe I clicked on OK, it created the file.
Once the file is created, I then switched to Geneanet. Pulling down the Family Tree menu reveals the option to Import/Export a GEDCOM file.
That opens the Update Your Family Tree page. Since I used everyone in my RootsMagic file to create the GEDCOM, I have a lot of people that would have been given the Living X name. That is likely the cause of the ‘loop error’ I received after first uploading my tree. Since it hasn’t kept me from browsing my tree or uploading a new file, I’ve been ignoring that error. To upload a new GEDCOM file, I simply drag the file into the ‘drag and drop’ box and then clicked on SEND.
Once uploaded, I had to set the ‘home’ person and the tree owner. Since I’m living and privatized all living people in my tree, there are a lot of living people in the uploaded GEDCOM file. Thus, it is difficult to set the ‘home’ person and ‘tree owner’ and have a new upload recognize those settings.
Thus, I’m going to set the ‘home’ person to my father. Once I have the home person set, I can find myself in my tree as a living person. Then I can change the name which will allow me to set the ‘owner’ of the tree to myself. Because of the need to change this data, I do not plan to do this on a daily basis. However, this is a way that my tree can be backed up as a tree.
