Once I got really involved in doing ancestry I bought Family Tree Maker and downloaded my gedcom off of ancestry to build on my desktop. At the time building on line could be an exercise in patience. Everything was entered by hand, switching from one view to another after having waited what seems like forever for it to load.
Working off my desktop program increased the speed of the entry along considerably and gave me greater flexibility in editing, comparing and publishing. Seeing as it seems like forever ago and so much has changed I decided to once again try Ancestry’s on line tree builder. I have been working on the ancestry of a friend of mine, who it turns out is related to Daniel Boone. Needless to say he was thrilled at this.
Attaching records has become a point and click process. Ancestry does the searching for you, although you can force it to search further and select from the posted results. As easy as this has become you have to watch what you are doing or you can end up attaching people willy-nilly and really mess things up. (Spoken from experience)
One of the problems with it so far is that when giving you the ability to add into your tree family information on a comparison screen it doesn’t show all of what you already have added. I found that I have added in children and spouses more than once because it didn’t match exactly what I had. I also haven’t found a way to download the gedcom to my desktop and then reload it back to the website without creating another tree entry. This also causes a problem with the support documents, it breaks the links.
There still isn’t the ability, like the desktop version to create books of family information, aside from the fancy book you can bind. It seems to be good way to progress quickly making basic family connections and sharing with family friends for input. They can add information but can only search the available free data sources.
Ancestry online absolutely has that limitation with uploading new GEDCOM files to replace the one you already have there. If you have performed any work on your online version and upload a new one, you lose all the links on the online version. I have talked with Ancestry.com and they currently do not have a solution, nor do they anticipate a solution date for this issue. I however, have a solution you might want to investigate, it’s what my website is running on. It allows you to make accounts for relatives to add information. You can upload your GEDCOM file as many times as you want without the fear of losing links. If you want more info, just ask. 🙂