Ancestry hints

[familydar]

Playing with ancestry hints, most distant and obscure found so far father-in-law of brother-in-law of 3rd great-aunt but I'm sure many rootschatters can beat this 

Jane :-)

[andrewalston]

As someone who works offline and occasionally uploads a GEDCOM, Ancestry only gives hints for things which I already know.

For example, I may have a marriage certificate, but because the entries in my tree data point to my copy of it rather than anything in their databases, they suggest that I follow up the link in their GRO index.

No, I'm not going to adjust every record in my uploaded data to match their model. My offline data is much more detailed, including thousands of events which are thrown away when I upload them.

[Nic.]

Hi

I’m currently being driven crazy by hints containing Coates of Arms and a picture denoting that this person died young.

I have a large tree on line of basically one name which I’ve been using to sort out who is who - large families reusing the same names in the same generation and in the same area.

It feels like I’m constantly having to ignore these hints.  Wouldn’t it be good if you could tell it to ignore all data coming from a particular source.

Nic

[Johnf04]

If you choose "create and manage trees" "manage tree" "hint preferences" you can turn off hints.

[pinefamily]

Or don't have a tree on Ancestry. Works for me.

[Mike Morrell (NL)]

IMHO, quickly accepting Ancestry Hints as being 'plausible' can really screw up your tree data big time! It took me a while to discover that Ancestry Hints can be wildly inaccurate (however plausible they may seem).

Ancestry does a really good job of 'suggesting possibilities'. But if you're serious about genealogy, you really do need to know what you're looking for and verify the source data of the 'hints' in relation to what you already have.

Ancestry (IMHO) makes it easy for beginners to quickly build up a family tree based on 'hints'. After a while, when you learn more about 'facts', related sources and related media, you begin to wonder about how verifiable your tree (based in part on Ancestry 'hints') really is. In many cases, some facts and/or relationships are not. So then you have to start verifying your tree data (based on original sources) from scratch.

Personally, I think Ancestry does a reasonably good job in providing 'possible matches' (hints). But I think it could do more to explain the limitations of its 'matching' algorithm. Having said that, I've sometimes found a person I was looking for on page 5 or 6 of Ancestry's search page.

Mike

[mgeneas]

And some improbable looking hints turn out to be true. Things I would never have known to look for.

[andrewalston]

I've recently tried using the Ancestry tree feature with a friend's tree I had researched, as they don't have a computer able to run the software I use.

Having uploaded the GEDCOM, I started converting the events and sources into the Ancestry style. It seemed sensible to look through the Hints to locate the Ancestry versions of the census images I had already found, and it worked quite well, most of the time. The entries pointed me at the profiles in the tree which I had yet to convert.

The first time I looked at the list there were 12 pages of hints, and I quickly knocked that down to 9, throwing away things like GRO index entries where I had a proper certificate. Some were obviously plain wrong, such as a marriage in the 18th century for someone born in the 20th. The most annoying hints were the "compiled from 7 other Ancestry trees" types, where I found that the stuff in the summary was, in fact, taken from the tree I had uploaded, and the other trees had little beyond a matching name, the majority being on other continents.

However as I worked through the list, the system kept adding more, such as marriages where the father's name vaguely matched someone in the tree. I've just looked, and there are now 39 pages of hints.

BUT - I can see why it is so easy for those who are not so careful to accept the hints as gospel, ending up with the garbage we often come across.

I've just realised that a large proportion of the 39 pages is made up of census entries, which are push at me over and over because the date I use (say 2 Apr 1871) doesn't match theirs (1871). They are, after all, American, so can't believe that a census could be organised well enough to collect all the information in a single night. 

[jaybelnz]

I have a friend for whom I created a very basic tree, of 3 generations. It was put onto Ancestry, and away she went. A week later, she came back to me, very excited, and said she had finished it, and it had loads of people and photos.   I went online to check it out - she had accepted every hint, and had formed herself a VERY strange tree!  😜😜🌺

Bless her, she was then in the early stages of Alzheimer's, but as I didn't want to disillusion her, I told her daughter about it, gave her the info I had, and invited her as an editor to fix it up. . Since then, the daughter's done a great job, deleting stuff and finding new things, but she's kept it fairly basic for now, so she can show to her Mum, who thinks that she did it herself, and is very proud of herself.  Needless to say Mum can only get access to view!