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Ancestry Public Trees versus Private - a new debate

On the subject of having a minimal ancestor only tree for DNA matches to see. Ancestry could provide a “create dna tree” button on your online tree.
 
peter said:
What a great idea! I'm sure many of us have notes like this in our offline trees, but including them in my online trees isn't something I'd thought of doing.
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I sync my ancestry trees with FTM 2017 and the comments I put on Ancestry are unaffected as FTM doesn't seem to have the facility for storing comments as opposed to notes, which are synced fine (both ways). As notes on Ancestry are only visible to those invited to your tree as an editor (which I never do), I copy the relevant bits across to comments in my on-line trees so they are visible to others.
 
I use notes which is easily synced by FTM and Ancestry, which I then use to make the most of FTM's colour coding by filtering by the contents of those notes.
 
Having just read Peter's latest newsletter I thought I should come back to this to see what is being suggested. One thing that stands out after reading through about 14 pages is, it is extremely difficulty to get people to stay 'on topic'.
I agree that enhancements to Ancestry could be made. In the past I have used the Send us Your Comments or Suggestions link on my Home page and never even received an acknowledgement.

We all do things differently, some of us will accept contact from other members and reply, others don't. Comments you make in other members trees are not necessarily seen by the tree owner, it depends on their email settings.

Before I contact somebody through their profile I look to see when they last signed in, it is probably safe to assume that if it was months or years ago they are no longer a member so I do not try to make connection.

Comments I make in other people's trees are usually for pointing out where things have gone wrong and I do that when the profile intimates that the person is no longer a member.
Those comments can be seen by other users who might be looking at the tree.

Recent member connect activity will only display on your home page if you have ticked the relevant Activity Filters which appear when you click on 'See more'.

Most of the discussion in the preceding threads relates to DNA, throw your hands up in horror if you like but I am not the least bit interested in DNA.

One of Peter's suggestions 'make it easier to identify unrecognised places and correct them' wouldn't be a priority for me. Ancestry has stopped using the original county names so how would it work?

Being somewhat of a pedant myself, I note that jorghes grandmother was born in Tower Hamlets, Kent. Tower Hamlets was never in Kent, it was originally Middlesex but is now London.

One thing I have always wanted in Ancestry is the ability to run reports. Especially for my ignored Hints, because now that I am more experienced I feel there are hidden Hints that I should not have ignored.
 
At home in NZ said:
Being somewhat of a pedant myself, I note that jorghes grandmother was born in Tower Hamlets, Kent. Tower Hamlets was never in Kent, it was originally Middlesex but is now London.
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You're in good company in the Forum being a pedant. Being married to one, I tend to lean the other way, but I admit Tower Hamlets, in Kent sticks out like a sore thumb, but having come across that one before (and now living in Kent) I have to tell you -and others - there is a Tower Hamlets in Kent. Here is a Google extract:

"As well as being a London borough, Tower Hamlets is the name of a residential estate and electoral ward in Dover, the seaside town in Kent best-known for its white cliffs.
Kent's Tower Hamlets is far lesser-known than east London's, so there's far less information available about it. Let's begin by looking at the road names: There's a Tower Hamlets Road, a Tower Hamlets Street, a Tower Street and even a Tower Hill "

Of course the Tower Hamlets in question might still be the London borough (more than likely it is) but you never know, it could be the Tower Hamlets in Kent!

(I suppose that make me somewhat pedantic too)
 
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You learn something every day, I grew up in Kent (Belvedere), my daughter lives in Folkestone and I've never heard of Tower Hamlets in Kent. Thanks for putting me in my place, oops I mean right.
I've lived in NZ for many years, hence the moniker.
 
At home in NZ said:
I've lived in NZ for many years, hence the moniker.
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I'd never have guessed! :oops: But that aside can I just say although I am keeping on the sidelines for now about Peter's quest for ways for Ancestry to improve, I did pick up your note about wanting to be able to ignore(delete) Ancestry Member's Tree Hints you do not wish to see again (as you can with general Hints), I totally agree. (I gave your post a green agree tick, as I see did 2 others). I only hope that features in the final roundup offered to Ancestry.
 
I like this conversation about all of this - unfortunately I'm the one in the wrong, it is the Tower Hamlets in Middlesex - FTM prefers the old places as opposed to the new ones and being an Aussie I'm not familiar with all of them.

But considering two of her siblings died in St Anne Limehouse and her mother in Holborn, and I have her baptism records from St James Garlickhithe, it makes sense that I needed to correct her birth place to Tower Hamlets, Middlesex.
Thanks for the correction!!
 
I only have a tree attached to my DNA results on Ancestry...it's public and what I call our Who Made Us Tree, as my husband's DNA results are managed by me.
This tree just has direct lines as far back as we have gone, giving name, county where born...sometimes town and year of birth. This gives enough info for
finding others looking for surnames in the same area when using the 'blue button ' search. It is so easy to do things the quick way these days and
as many other contributors have said, mistakes abound on the main Ancestry public trees.
 
At home in NZ said:
Before I contact somebody through their profile I look to see when they last signed in, it is probably safe to assume that if it was months or years ago they are no longer a member so I do not try to make connection.
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Good strategy, and one I also use. Certainly if it's more than a year. Less than that is more of a grey area, though generally >6 months since last login and I tend to assume they have lost interest.

At home in NZ said:
Comments I make in other people's trees are usually for pointing out where things have gone wrong and I do that when the profile intimates that the person is no longer a member. Those comments can be seen by other users who might be looking at the tree.
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Good point. Even if the tree isn't being maintained and the mistake won't be rectified, it will still alert others looking at the tree. I hadn't thought of that aspect.

At home in NZ said:
One thing I have always wanted in Ancestry is the ability to run reports. Especially for my ignored Hints, because now that I am more experienced I feel there are hidden Hints that I should not have ignored.
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I'm not sure what sort of 'report' you have in mind. Can't you just go back and look at your ignored Hints if you want to reassess them? Mine never seem to go away, they just get filed into an 'ignored' section so I can revisit them if I later find they might be valid after all.
 
I would like the ability to mark a hint as wrong, so that other members who have added it can see it, and take action.
 
Helen7 said:
Can't you just go back and look at your ignored Hints if you want to reassess them?
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This would take forever, I would have to look at every person in my trees, 5,000 plus!
The report would be a list of the people that have ignored hints attached to them, very much like the list of Hints for a tree. One of my trees has over 1,000 Hints which I find hard to keep up with. I looked at one person yesterday to find they have 25 Hints, some of them are the jpg files which are downloads of censuses as well as photos that people attach to their trees.
 
At home in NZ said:
This would take forever, I would have to look at every person in my trees, 5,000 plus!
The report would be a list of the people that have ignored hints attached to them, very much like the list of Hints for a tree. One of my trees has over 1,000 Hints which I find hard to keep up with. I looked at one person yesterday to find they have 25 Hints, some of them are the jpg files which are downloads of censuses as well as photos that people attach to their trees.
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Oh, I see now. Yes, a report like that would be useful! I agree it is easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of hints, many of which are irrelevant or duplicates of information already attached.
 
At home in NZ said:
This would take forever, I would have to look at every person in my trees, 5,000 plus!
The report would be a list of the people that have ignored hints attached to them, very much like the list of Hints for a tree. One of my trees has over 1,000 Hints which I find hard to keep up with. I looked at one person yesterday to find they have 25 Hints, some of them are the jpg files which are downloads of censuses as well as photos that people attach to their trees.
Click to expand...

You can filter your hints - if you view "all hints" for a tree, you can filter them by "Records", "Photos", "Stories" and "Member Trees", and you can also filter them by surname/first name for the hints.

I use this feature to remove all superfluous photo hints like the ones you describe (photos I may have already added, photos of censuses which have already been attached to the tree, occasionally screen shots of Ancestry record pages...); occasionally I then use it to see if I have already cleared hints for my main surnames etc.

It won't allow you to look at ignored hints, but perhaps adding an "Ignored" option will help with that.
 
jorghes said:
You can filter your hints
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Yes I know all that thanks and I do use the filters. I like the name function best because it shows you all the Hints for the person. If you do a filter in any of the other ways and see one hint you think might be useful then go to that person you can find many other 'useless' hints. That's how I ended up looking at somebody with 25 Hints.
I very much prefered the old way of displaying the hints where it showed the number of hints per person. I did ask Ancestry if they could retain that as an option but got the usual silence.
 
I was interested in the discussion on hints and I revisited some of mine. I don’t rely much on hints in Ancestry. I found that many of the recent hints were being generated from a few entries in my public direct ancestors only tree being incorporated into several unrelated trees. I’m getting the hints from those trees now as well as hints of the records in those trees. It is a bit like social media posts “going viral”.

The entries are for very common names - John Jones and Ellen Roberts in one case - being incorporated into trees belonging to people with few UK lines. I guess they won’t have access to UK records and that they don’t know about common Welsh names.

Has anyone found a way of filtering out this kind of hint?
 
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