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I want to migrate from Ancestry

606 words·3 mins
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Use this when you’ve been building your tree on Ancestry.com and want to move it (or a copy of it) into Charted Roots. By the end you’ll have your tree’s structured data — people, relationships, dates, places, sources — imported into your vault. Photos, stories, and Ancestry’s hints/research tools won’t come over (a known Ancestry limitation), but the structured genealogy comes through cleanly.

You don’t have to abandon Ancestry to do this. Exporting a GEDCOM doesn’t delete or modify your Ancestry tree; it’s a one-way snapshot.

What you’ll need
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  • Your Ancestry account credentials.
  • Your tree available in your account (any size).
  • (Recommended) A Staging folder configured under Settings → Charted Roots → Folders → System folders so you can review before merging.

Steps
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1. Export your tree from Ancestry
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In a browser:

  • Sign in to Ancestry.com.
  • Click the Trees tab → select your tree from the dropdown.
  • Click the Settings gear icon for the tree.
  • Click Export tree.
  • Choose GEDCOM format (Ancestry’s export is GEDCOM 5.5).
  • Click Download. For large trees, the download may take a few minutes to generate; Ancestry will email you when it’s ready.
  • Save the .ged file somewhere you can find again.

2. Import into Charted Roots
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Control Center → Tools → Import/Export → Import. Pick GEDCOM 5.5.1 as the format (5.5 files import fine via this path). Drag-and-drop the file.

Configure import options — entity types, target folder (your Staging folder if you set one up), conflict handling. Run the import.

The Data Quality Preview surfaces Ancestry-specific quirks: place-name variants are common because Ancestry doesn’t enforce a canonical form. Standardize them in the preview before importing — see I want to import a GEDCOM file and clean up the result for the full preview workflow.

3. Verify and assess what’s missing
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Open a few person notes. You should see:

  • ✅ Names, dates, places, relationships
  • ✅ Source citations from Ancestry (your saved sources come through)
  • ✅ Notes you wrote in Ancestry’s note fields
  • ❌ Photos — not in the GEDCOM; re-attach manually if needed
  • ❌ Stories — not in the GEDCOM; re-attach manually
  • ❌ Ancestry hints and research tools — Ancestry-only feature, doesn’t transfer

For photos and stories, you can download them individually from Ancestry and attach via the media management workflow.

Variations
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  • Living person privacy. Ancestry’s export honors your privacy settings — living people may be redacted as “Living” or excluded depending on your tree’s settings. Configure Charted Roots’ own privacy-on-export settings under Settings → GEDCOM if you plan to re-share.
  • Subset export. Ancestry exports your full tree — no built-in subset option. To narrow scope, do a full import and then use Charted Roots’ selective branch export to share narrower slices later.
  • Re-import after Ancestry edits. Each export is a snapshot. Re-importing overwrites or merges based on your conflict-handling setting. Merge is the safe default for re-imports — preserves your Charted Roots-side edits while picking up new Ancestry data.
  • Using both tools side by side. Export from Ancestry → import to Charted Roots → continue research in either or both. There’s no sync; treat them as independent trees that share a starting point.

Related guides#

Reference
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