General overview

This tool provides a way to set up a more customized display for your family tree, pulling the people/families from your GEDCOM file to set up the structure (you can also add them one at a time using the django admin), but where you then add your own custom content and have control over the display.

After the initial GEDCOM import is done, you'll still be learning new things in your family tree and adding new people. You need a way to map a person's record in this tree with the one in ancestry, and unfortunately the GEDCOM format doesn't provide unique IDs.

Background info about IDs:

• In a gedcom file, the INDI values associate people and family records to each other. However, these are only internal to the specific file, and THESE IDs CAN CHANGE in subsequent gedcom exports from the same tool. Therefore as a workaround we use the "also known as" fact, which maps to a FACT tag of type AKA in gedcom file, giving a unique value to each person, in both this tree and then back in the ancestry tree as well.
• A combination of import scripts populate unique IDs for the families (following this convention: https://www.ged-gen.com/help/hlpmisc-number.html) and people ("gedcom_UUID"), which we then (manually for now) populate in ancestry.com as an "also known as" fact, which maps to a FACT tag of type AKA in gedcom file.