How do I download all of my ancestors in a GEDCOM file?

Question

I have just realised that the GEDCOM files that I have been downloading, appear to be truncated at four generations of ancestors, in at least one of my ancestral lines.

The total number of people in the latest downloaded  GEDCOM file, is less than 1,000.

It has occurred to me that the earlier generations of that ancestral line, have a profile manager that is not me.

Are profiles that have a profile manager that is not the person requesting the GEDCOM file export, prohibited from being included in the exported GEDCOM file?

Answer 1

Hi Bret. The answer to your question is "yes, profiles not on your Trusted List are prohibited", if you use the default watchlist option at

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Special:DownloadGedcom

However, you can instead choose a given ancestor, enter their WikiTree ID in the box, and get a GEDCOM file with all their descendants, with whatever profile manager (up to a maximum of 10,000 and subject to profile privacy restrictions).

This is still not very satisfactory because it only gives one line. But by repeating with several key ancestors, you can get a lot of coverage.

Comments

If that is correct, then that is disappointing, and, to me, invalidates the benefits if Wikitree, where our ancestors are owned by other people, prohibiting our full access to the information regarding our ancestors.

I think that I can no longer in good faith, recommend that people join and add their family trees to Wikitree, where a single person, who may or may not be related to a person's ancestor, can own another person's ancestor, prohibiting the descendant, full access to the information regarding the ancestor. Such singular ownership of another person's ancestor, and, prohibition of full access to information regarding a person's ancestor, is morally and ethically, wrong.

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You do have full access to Open profiles for viewing and editing (except for the Last Name at Birth). GEDCOM file export is very much a subsidiary function on WikiTree, not in keeping with the site's philosophy of narrative biography, and does not have a high priority or emphasis for software improvement. It also does not do well with middle names, and does not use the standard GEDCOM source fields at all, so there's nothing special about this particular limitation.

You can download a great deal of information about profiles in your CC7 (connections up to 7 degrees away) using the WikiTree API getPeople call which produces JSON format, and some with WikiTree Plus or the BioCheck app which can give spreadsheet output.