No So Random Blank Timeline Events

 

I can't tell you how many times I've seen people in forums complain Ancestry is changing their tree. They typical response is "No, Ancestry doesn't change your tree. Only you can change your tree. Have you given access to someone else? Did you perhaps save something to the wrong tree?" In most of these cases, people are concerned about deletions or missing branches. Both would be very concerning for sure!. And generally, I agree with the response. Unless you've given access to someone else, or a collection has been removed from the site, there's no reason to expect random changes to your tree on Ancestry.

But a hiccup between Ancestry and FTM has been adding unanticipated blank facts into my Ancestry tree. I've seen it happen a couple dozen times in the last month or so. I open a person profile to be greeted with one or two blank birth, death, or marriage facts at the bottom of the timeline. Most often, it seems to be marriage. I've safely deleted the blank facts on Ancestry, with no issues, but it begs the question WHY are they showing up?

To be perfectly clear, I don't save facts directly from hints. I enter all data manually before saving the hint, unchecking all selected boxes before saving. Then, I edit the citation to link the appropriate facts back to it. I don't let Ancestry do any of the data entry or linking facts to the citation. Plus, there's no reason there should ever be a totally blank fact on any person's timeline in my tree. Anyone familiar with manually entering facts on Ancestry knows you can't even save a completely blank fact. You don't have an opton to Save, only to Close.

Now, in this particular case, the person was married twice. One marriage is appropriately linked to both people in my tree using a standard Marriage fact. Since this person married into my family, her other spouse is not someone I choose to research. So, I create a custom fact for the other marriage (so I don't need to select a spouse) and I simply include the name of the spouse in the description. It's essentially a Marriage fact linked only to one person. In this case, both of those marriage facts are still exactly where they should be. I just have 2 more blank Marriage facts mysteriously showing at the very bottom of the timeline.

So, why do I think this is happening? I believe it's a hiccup (or change in logic) between Ancestry and FTM. When I investigated the most recent blank facts, I found they also existed in FTM, but linked to an unknown spouse. Having encountered the "unknown spouse" issue many times in the past, I understand how this can happen in FTM, and I've generally learned to ignore it, since it wasn't really causing any problem. But now, it seems the logic has changed during sync and it may indeed be creating a blank fact. After deleting the blank facts on Ancestry and syncing again, the blank facts are also removed in FTM. However, FTM still seems to think there's an unknown spouse and shows the following, even though the "facts" themselves are gone:

More than likely, my custom Marriage fact (linking only to the person I'm researching) is causing the majority of the cases. It's quite possible death facts may be a similar cause because there may be a spouse hyperlinked in the Ancestry record, but I may not be linking the record to the person (since they aren't actually in my tree). The Birth facts are a little murkier. I wonder if perhaps it's happening when only one parent is listed, or the hyperlinked parent has no name (someting I've noticed from time to time on Ancestry). Clicking on a "no name" hyperlink in a record returns an unknown page on Ancestry....so it makes sense if FTM is looking for the information and it can't find it. But it appears clear, the blank facts are being created on the FTM side when I sync down from Ancestry.

The new twist seems to be Ancestry allowing the blank fact upload when I sync the next time - something it won't allow to be created directly on the Ancestry site, and something I've never noticed uploading from FTM in the past. It's not a huge issue, and as I said, I can safely delete these blank facts quite easily if I find them. Please note, I have NOT tested deleting these blank facts in FTM first. I've only deleted them on Ancestry and synced down. I do not know if deleting in FTM will work exactly the same. I choose to avoid messing with unknown spouse issues in FTM (it's simply my personal preference).

The moral of this story? If you choose to use custom facts, or choose not to link some records to a spouse or parent, and you use FTM - you might occasionally see something odd appear on Ancestry you know you didn't enter. But rest assured, it doesn't mean anyone is "doing" anything to your tree. In my specific instances, it's seems to be an explainable sync hiccup and can be resolved with a couple quick deletions on Ancestry.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay