How to Manually Transfer Your Sources From Ancestry.com to Your Genealogy Program (Quickly)

It's been many months since I first decided that I wanted to manually transfer my sources from Ancestry.com to my genealogy program of choice, Legacy family tree. When I first started my transferring, Family Tree Maker was still actively supporting transfers of information from Ancestry.com to their program and now RootsMagic has introduced support. Yet, I still decided to manually transfer. There were quite a few reasons for my decision to manually reenter the information, but I'll just list the main ones:

1. Ancestry.com has abysmal sources for a lot of their documents in my opinion. In most cases the only halfway decent ones are censuses, and oftentimes I will find the auto-sourcing they do has incorrect values for fields like page numbers.
2. I want everything in my local tree to be as accurate as possible. When I first started working on my tree I was, let's face it, not especially concerned with accuracy. By going through each record individually I can check each record individually.
3. I can save source images to my local file. These aren't for anything other than my own personal reference, as it is not at all legal or encouraged to distribute these images (they are the property of ancestry), but if I ever need to cancel my subscription I can still glean information from them.
4. My tree on ancestry is not mine. I collaborate on it with my great uncle Van Wert (who did extensive work even before records were available online!). So even if I wanted to I wouldn't be able to download everything (which worked out for me in the end). 
5. Name recognition. When you force yourself to really read the records, you will begin to see the same names over and over. Name recognition has been crucial for me in finding immigrant ancestors, as its not abnormal for the names you see over and over to be family from overseas.

So, now that you know my reasons for manually entering my sources, I will share my process, which I have finely tuned to ensure full transfer of all records in the fastest way possible.

Make a Spreadsheet of Ancestors

As I personally use excel, that is the program I will show this step in. However, this could be modified for any spreadsheet program you like to use, such as google sheets.

I started out with a spreadsheet of only my direct line ancestors. Because of the number of records I have to transfer, I am still on this particular spreadsheet. It's important to note that I only use this spreadsheet for records directly from Ancestry.com. I have a separate spreadsheet for the media people post on ancestry, my reasoning being that before downloading pictures of people I should contact the person who posted said picture and get the full citation information, which is a slower process and not as linear.

The spreadsheet itself is pretty basic with as few fields as possible. I have one header called "Relationship" and one called "Name". 

My Ancestor Spreadsheet

In the relationship column, I simply put their relationship to me. I start with self, parents, grandparents, etc. In the Name column, I put the name of the ancestor. Sometimes I will opt not to use their middle name if there are no similar first names in the same generation. I keep track of who I have completed using the color of the relationship column. When I have not completed a person I leave their cell as white and when I have I change the color to green. Further, I make sure I include a spot in my spreadsheet for every person in that generation, regardless of whether I know them or not. That makes it easier to add the person if you do find them as well as allows you to see where the holes in your tree are at a glance. I include one yellow cell at the end of every generation to indicate that all the people from that generation have been acknowledged in the spreadsheet.

The end of the 4th Great Grandparents section of my spreadsheet

Downloading Images From Ancestry

Now downloading an image is pretty self-explanatory. You just click the download button on the record image. However, unless you have modified your settings all the pictures will go to the same place (your downloads folder) without letting you name them until its already been downloaded. You can change this setting, however, and I recommend you do as you will find the process of downloading, naming, and moving is much faster. I'll will explain what you need to do in chrome, but you can look up the specific instructions for any browser you may wish to use.

In chrome, navigate to the top right-hand corner of the screen. You will see 3 dots stacked one on top of the other. Click these, then click on settings when the menu pops up.

Both the button with the 3 stacked dots and the settings button are circled

You should now find yourself in chrome settings. In the top left-hand corner of the screen, you will see 3 lines stacked one on top of the other. Click this and you will see a side menu appear. In this menu click 'Advanced'.

Click the Advanced settings button

In this advanced menu click on 'Downloads'.

The downloads button

You are nearly done now! Under the downloads setting you may now turn on 'Ask where to save each file before downloading'.

The 'Ask where to save each file before downloading' switch

Now if I go to Ancestry and download an image, it doesn't just automatically download. It first asks me what I would like to name it and which folder I would like to save it in. This also forces me to stay organized, which is never a bad thing!

Make Use of Shared Events

Why enter an event multiple times if you don't have to? Legacy has a nice feature called shared events. To use it, navigate to the person you want to add the event to (for censuses I usually add it to the head of the household, for nearly all others I add it to the main person featured in the event) and add the event as you normally would. Then double-click on the shared event space in between the event descriptor and the event source fields.

The shared event field

You will be taken to a screen where you will be able to add people who share the event as well as assign roles to them, such as wife, daughter, and son.

Choose people to share the event with

Final Thoughts

Well, that's pretty much it. Hopefully, this helped you in some way increase the speed at which you can enter sources into your genealogy program of choice. The best part of spending less time on data entry is having more time to spend on analysis and writing!

Do you have any tips for increasing workflow speed? If so I'd love to hear them in the comments!