Do You Use Shared Facts?

For years, I’ve avoided using shared facts. Somewhere along the way, I had read the advice not to rely on shared facts because they don’t transfer well via GEDCOM. Even the RootsMagic help page on “Sharing Facts” reinforces this concern, noting that “shared facts are not always transferable to other programs or websites.” That warning was enough to keep me from using the feature.

But recently, while working with AI tools, I discovered just how much information can be lost when shared facts aren’t part of a person’s narrative.

I wanted to create a “time in the life” story for my grandmother, Winnie Letha Currey, focusing on roughly ten years—from the death of her mother in 1913 through the gradual reunification of the Currey siblings about twelve years later. These were years filled with upheaval, separation, and major turning points that shaped who she became.

Yet when I generated her narrative report in RootsMagic, many of those life-altering events were missing. They appeared in her siblings’ and father’s timelines, but not in hers—simply because I had never shared those facts with her profile.

To fix this, I manually edited her narrative report to include her mother’s death, the placement of siblings in other homes, the girls’ time in a Kansas City children’s home, and other events that unquestionably shaped her teen years. I used this expanded report to create my “A Time in the Life of Winnie Letha Currey” post with ChatGPT.

Then, to experiment further, I fed the extended narrative into Google Notebook LM, which produced both an audio overview and an infographic. Those pieces became the foundation for the following video.

This process made something very clear:
these extended events mattered far more to my grandmother’s story than a census record, street address, or routine timeline item ever could. And yet, because I wasn’t sharing facts, they weren’t appearing where they needed to.

Curious how others handled this, I searched for guidance from experienced RootsMagic users and found a few helpful sources:

• Randy Seaver’s 2017 post, “Using the Share Button in RootsMagic Facts.”
• RootsMagic Help: “Moving or Copying a Fact.”
• RootsMagic Help: “Sharing Facts.”
• A February 19 Facebook discussion where someone noted that shared facts don’t transfer to Ancestry and asked whether there was ever a situation where sharing a fact still makes sense. One commenter offered an explanation that perfectly illustrated why I should have been using shared facts all along.

This experience has me rethinking how I document the relationships and events that affect multiple people in a family. If the goal is accurate storytelling—and ensuring that life-changing events appear in every relevant narrative—shared facts may be worth using, even with their GEDCOM limitations.

This whole experience reminded me that genealogy software features aren’t just technical tools—they shape the stories we’re able to tell. By skipping shared facts, I unintentionally silenced parts of my grandmother’s childhood that deeply influenced who she became. Rebuilding her narrative through AI made those gaps impossible to ignore. Going forward, I suspect I’ll be far more intentional about sharing facts among family members, even if the GEDCOM limitations remain. After all, our goal as genealogists is to honor the truth of a life, and sometimes that truth depends on events that ripple across an entire family, not just one individual.