Rumor in the RootsMagic community indicates that there is a limit to the size of a family tree when interfacing with RootsMagic. As a former network administrator for a high school, I experienced the need of students and staff for hard drive space while having to work with a budget that didn’t allow unlimited space. Thus, I’m guessing that this decision was prompted by your technical support staff indicating that the need for space to store and backup data was outpacing the available resources. If my guess is on target, then a business decision was likely made to set a maximum size.
Unfortunately, if such a decision has been made, it is ignoring the added value some of these larger trees bring to Ancestry.
My Heartland Genealogy tree of almost 20,000 individuals not only traces my ancestors back quite a few generations but also traces descendants of those ancestors forward several generations. This tree was created when RootsMagic’s TreeShare feature became available in 2017. By uploading my RootsMagic data to Ancestry, the source information that I had accumulated from almost 40 years of research was also uploaded.
Since that time, I have been working my way thru my tree to evaluate the leaf hints that Ancestry provides and to add additional sourcing to my tree. Thus, I currently have 15,539 records attached to the individuals in my tree.
I am sharing with other Ancestry users my work over the years to identify and document not only ancestors but also cousins. Even though I have readily shared my work in a variety of ways, my tree on Ancestry is the only place where that work is updated on a regular basis.
Besides my tree, I manage four DNA tests. Each of these tests is attached to individuals in my tree. Because most of the branches of my tree go back to the colonial days of the United States, I have lots of DNA matches on Ancestry. Since my large tree contains a lot of descendancy research, the Ancestry computers are able to identify the Common Ancestor for many of my matches. My documented tree also makes my ThruLines more accurate. Thus, my tree is not only helping me identify my matches, but it is also helping my matches figure out how we are related.
My tree also contains my FAN club research of the CRAWFORD family in early Kentucky and my efforts to identify various men named James Crawford and their ancestry. Yes, I could possibly pull this data out of my primary tree and place it in a secondary tree. However, that does not remove enough individuals from my primary tree to get it below the 15,000 threshold — AND — I’m continuing to research descendants of my 3rd great grandfathers which just adds to my tree.
I believe my tree, my research and my DNA data adds value to the Ancestry community. And, I believe that there are many other genealogists using RootsMagic to connect with Ancestry whose tree and accompanying research also adds value to the Ancestry site.
Thus, I am asking you to not place limits on our ability to share this research with the Ancestry community.
Marcia Crawford Philbrick
Heartland Genealogy
I am not sure that this is Ancestry’s fault. I was able to upload my tree with 66,000 persons from RM7 to a new AMT two weeks ago, although I refrained from adding media.
Some on the RootsMagic Users Group on Facebook think that the RM8 problem occurs because RM8 is a 32-bit program that apparently has a 2 gigabyte limit on memory storage during uploads or downloads. I see RM8 getting up to about 1.4 gb memory before it bombs out on my new Win10 computer using the Task Manager. I don’t know what happened, but RM is being pretty quiet about this. I’m very frustrated, as I think you are too.
I got it to work on my desktop with 32 GB of RAM but can’t get it to work on my laptop with 4 GB RAM. I have also seen the comments (complaints) about the program being 32 bit.
However, another RM user who I think has more ‘inside’ knowledge than me indicated that there is a tree size limit of 15,000. He has posted that as a comment several times on the FB group.
I’ve asked this user for advice about splitting my file, but after some experimentation, I don’t think I can get it below that 15,000 threshold without jeopardizing my descendancy research and/or my existing Ancestry tree. This other user is suggesting waiting versus taking any action with my file.
A tree size of 15,000 is an arbitrary number. This issue coincides with Ancestry’s moving data to new servers (which broke TreeShare). Whether Ancestry is or is not the one behind the 15,000 limit, I want them to know that all of our larger trees add value to their product. And, that this value should be considered when making decisions about server space.
Interesting conundrum … I’m safe for a while, with just over 2,000 in my tree, but I can imagine the frustration for those of you with larger ones. So hard to pinpoint the issue as the release of RM8 and the Ancestry server change were pretty much synonymous…