My own TNG site was looking pretty spiffy last week, all plump with lots of dead relatives and images. Then I noticed, on one of my individual’s pages, something that should not be there. No, I screamed (silently to myself, we family researchers being a quiet lot), NO!!!
There, on the individual profile page, along with the tabs for Individual, Ancestors, Timeline and Edit, was a tab for GEDCOM. I was not logged in but my site was offering my GEDCOM for any drive-by visitor to download all of my family research. How did that get there?
Time to dig through the settings. First thought was the General Settings page, likely under Privacy or Miscellaneous, or somewhere in the vicinity. No luck. Well then, it must be a User setting because that is where you restrict people’s roles and responsibilities, right? Again, no luck.
My son kindly led me to the right page: Trees. Which makes sense in the end, as a GEDCOM is associated with one tree, inside TNG. You export one tree at a time, and you import the GEDCOM into a selected tree. So you control access to any GEDCOM through the Tree page. Let’s explore.
Setting up of a tree is straight-forward and visit the article TNG: How to set up trees for an explanation. Note on the bottom of the page a set of check boxes, including one labelled as: “Don’t allow users to download GEDCOM files”. That’s the magic key. By selecting that, the GEDCOM tab will not appear on either individual or family pages to the visiting public. It will also not be visible to your registered users unless you set their User page GEDCOM permission to “Allow”. See the article TNG: Security and users for more explanations.
If you have multiple trees on your site, as I do, you can set some trees to allow GEDCOM downloads to users and other trees to disallow. This is a personal choice. I tried it out and it does work. Each individual and family in TNG is associated with a tree and the GEDCOM access is controlled by the tree setting.
I now have all of my tree GEDCOM permissions set to disallow user and public access and can be confident that my research remains within the family.
If you just export your GEDCOM out of TNG, and then re-import it into TNG, that does not fix the prefix of ‘P’ for individuals. Saving the GEDCOM: Assuming you are talking about exporting out of TNG (and not out of Ancestry), after clicking on the Export button, you should see a “Finished Exporting GEDCOM” message, followed by a link “Download GEDCOM”. Instead of left-clicking that link, do a right-click. In the popup window, choose “Save link as …”. That brings up another pop-up window, a file explorer. Note that the suggested filename to save will end in .ged. So select the directory that you want the file, perhaps change the file name, keep it as a .ged file, and you should now have your GEDCOM on your home computer.
I think I could strighten out a lot of things if I could just export my whole tree as a GEDCOM and then reimport it. But I get the 1/2 way through the export process but don’t see how to save the gedcom
thank, will look
There is a setting in TNG that will allow you to use the ‘P’ prefix instead of the default ‘I’. This will permit you to work with the Ancestry GEDCOM, which uses the ‘P’ code. Go into your Admin panel, then Settings >> General Settings >> Prefixes and Suffixes. Change the Person Prefix to = P. Then, when you import your GEDCOM from Ancestry, set the import to “Replace all current data”, to overwrite the previous information. Assuming that you want your TNG site to be synchronized to Ancestry.
In doing this, you are now stuck with individual prefix = ‘P’. That should not be a problem unless you also work with GEDCOM files outside of Ancestry.
My problem is that I added a bunch of people within TNG before I realized that, so now have a mix of I and P.
The ‘P’ must have been created within Ancestry (P for People?). Not by TNG. And yes, that would defeat any merging with other TNG information.
after the fact, I found out that importing a ancestry.com sourced GEDCOM into TNG has issues. The individuals become P rather than I and that the TNG merge function will not work with P, just I
You would be better off exporting it into some kind of database, where there are more tools available for data manipulation, instead of as a GEDCOM. If, for example, you got it into a database such as MySQL, or even as a spreadsheet. Both tools have ways to substitute Pxxxx int Ixxxx format. You say that you have the information already as a TNG site. So wouldn’t individuals already use the Ixxxx identification, which is the standard in TNG?
I have an Export question. I have a TNG tree with 24000+ people which i made from ancestry.com stuff. Now I find it is flawed as the people are Pxxxx instead of Ixxxx ID’s. I was hoping to export the ensire databse as a GEDCOM fix it in some tool and then make a new corrected tree. Possible?
Greg: if you look at the screenshot in the article, it shows three checkboxes. The article only discussed the middle box: “Don’t allow users to download GEDCOM files”. Note the third box: “Don’t allow users to create PDF files”. Now, there is another page you need to review.
Log in as Admin, go to the Administration page >> Setup >> Configuration >> General Settings >> Site Design and Definition. Scroll 2/3 down the page. Note the 3 choices: “Show Login/Logout Link”, “Show Share Link” and “Show Print Link”. These boxes control the visibility of icons in the upper-right of your pages. Just set the Print link to “No” and that should take care of your concern.
Jim Benedict
Hi Jim, Being very new to TNG and genealogy, I followed the instructions on set up and even reviewed your advice on using the “Don’t allow users to download GEDCOM files” and the other do not allow boxes. However last night I was on the site as a public visitor, decided to check settings, I was able to print to pdf, and on opening the pdf file the links were enabled just like I was on the site, I could print the entire tree. What did I do wrong ? Thanks, Greg