I’m trying to assemble my family tree, and having a hard time. Site is unintuitive and frustrating. Does anyone know its secrets, or know where I can find some?
What you should do is create a GEDCOM file and upload that to Ancestry.
The site will build your tree for you based on the data in the file.
NB: I don’t really have a presence on Ancestry but I have seen how it works. A good friend of ours has an account there and did some extensive work on her tree.
Perhaps the OP can explain what they’re having trouble with. I’ve built a family tree with ancestry.com and I found it pretty easy to use. There are some getting started tips here and here, but I don’t know how useful they are, depending on what problems you’re having.
Also, I don’t agree with the suggestion that someone who’s having trouble with the ancestry web site should install a new program and build a GEDCOM file with it. I’ve used some standalone genealogy programs and mostly found them harder to use than ancestry.com.
I have plenty of experience using Ancestry. But it’s been years since I’ve started a tree there.
What are you trying to do exactly? Under the upper dropdown menus is Tree->Create & Manage Trees. From there it will ask you to add a new person, usually starting with yourself.
As Skywatcher said if you have another genealogical programs it will expert a GEDCOM for you and you can upload that, but if you don’t have another program there’s no real reason for you to get one now.
You will get a lot of “hints” on your tree, take any tree hint with a huge grain of salt as a lot of people will guess or make assumptions. They will also just take trees from other people, which you can do pretty easy, so one wrong person can give you an entirely wrong branch.
As an illustration just now, my immediate issue (I have issues with Ancestry like Bayer has aspirins) is that I am staring at someone else’s tree that has information and ancestors that I want to export to my tree, but am clueless how that trick is done.
More long-standing is my problem with nomenclature: I have family members who’ve changed their first names and last names and both names, but I’m not sure how to designate these relatives on the tree. Use the name they were born with, or the name they changed it to? Put one of them in parentheses? Which one? This problem also applies to women of course who were generally born under one name and took their husbands’ names.
These are just two of many issues I could use some guidance on. Is there a reference work that explains these wrinkles clearly? I’m spending a lot of time trying to figure them out without guidance.
That’s something I wouldn’t do, just copying someone else’s tree, it’s best to do the input yourself. As I said before I’ve seen tons of problems with people doing that and it just snowballs from there. There’s a person on ancestry that has my grandmother in her tree, but she is married to a second husband with extra kids that I know she couldn’t have. That person just copied someone else’s tree and thought these two women, both named Mary, were the same even though they were born 10 years apart.
But if you do want to do that I think, I’m not subscribed so can’t test, that you click on the tree you want and one of the options is to copy or merge that branch to your tree.
Yes, naming seems to be a big thing. Generally it’s best to use the birth name when possible. There are ways to add extra names to which you can add notes or sources. If you go under the Profile for your person there is an Add button that will open a pop up that has a huge list of options to add names, address, dates, wills, almost anything you can come up with.
When people marry it’s usually assumed the woman will take the husband’s name, but now that’s not always the case, again you can use the alternate name or leave a note saying she didn’t change her name.
There are, but I don’t have any links right now. Let me look around and see what I can find. I’m surprised there isn’t something right there on Ancestry’s home page.
I do a lot of family research. The 3 websites I use to document my findings are wikitree, geni, and Family Search. All 3 are free (geni has a paid premium option). Family Search has very good, free, research tools if you use them carefully.
Now a warning: genealogy websites will propose “smart matches”. “Good news”, they will say, “we have found a match for your ancestor John Smith.” The trouble is, these matches are far from smart and have a very high percentage of false positives. Other users may take these at face value and “accept” the match, resulting in two different people being merged. This is how your ancestor may end up with two sets of parents.
I recommend that you don’t import anyone else’s information. Genealogy websites are notoriously riddled with error, which gets propagated as other users come across it and incorporate it into their own family trees. If you find information in someone else’s tree, fact-check it carefully by going back to the documentary sources, and then once you are sure it’s correct, manually enter it in your own tree.
There are different practices regarding naming, but all three of the websites I use allow for a birth name, married names and alternative names. The way the name is displayed (using brackets) varies between the three websites. It’s good practice to use the birth name as the “primary” name because it’s more helpful for research.
I’d be interested in this naming stuff–I have family members who have anglicized their family names, went by nicknames, had first names in foreign languages that they never used, etc. I’d like to make the naming consistent. What system do you use?
I’m also concerned about naming specific living people in my family tree. I’d like the tree to be accessible to the public, so I can get the maximum useful feedback on improvements, additions, subtractions, etc. but I don’t want to screw up living people by giving the answers to security questions (mainly “What is your mother’s maiden name?”) How do I maximize the one and minimize the other?
The sites should have living people private so only you, or someone who can view your whole tree, can see them. If your mother has died you can either leave out a date of death or make her private so no one can see her.
I always use the birth name, or closest one I can find. When I find different spellings, and that will happen once you get back before the mid-1800s, I add that as an extra name. I don’t add married names to women because that’s normally assumed, you can add note for that if someone doesn’t change their name. You’re going to find a ton of different spellings from birth records, censuses, marriage records, and death records. It’s really up to you to figure out what name to use, but most people stick with a birth name.
One thing to start doing now is cite everything you find. You’re going to find different dates for almost everything and if you don’t say where you found it a year from now you’ll going to be wondering what you looked at to find that info. I don’t use the long cites some people use, I usually just go with name of book, author, and page. Or if it’s a church book the church name and page.
Do you mean that Ancestry.com, for example, does this automatically? And that I can see the people’s names because I’m logged into my own tree but anyone else (not granted special access to my tree) looking at it will see only “private” where I see my own name and the name of my living brother?
Yes, if there is no date of death it will automatically set that person to living. I think if someone who would be 120+ with no date of death it will assume they have died. So you can just leave dates off and they would be private.
Could you be more precise, please? “Add” it, how?
John Marvin Doe (born John Marvin Dough) “Jackie” (legally changed to “Jack Doe” Las Vegas court, Feb 12, 1974)
, all on the “name” line?
I’d like to adopt a system that’s consistent, and also one that is in general use, if possible.
Under Ancestry on the person’s profile page there’s an Add button, that will open up a popup with a drop down. There are options for Also Known As and Name. But it seems you have to select under the filter to show name and gender as it doesn’t normally show alternate names.
[quote
John Marvin Doe (born John Marvin Dough) “Jackie” (legally changed to “Jack Doe” Las Vegas court, Feb 12, 1974)
, all on the “name” line?
[/quote]
No you’d have a line for just the name. So you’d have three lines here I guess:
John Marvin Dough (If that’s the birth name)
John Marvin Doe (this would be a second name)
“Jackie” is a nickname. I don’t see that option on Ancestry, but my program has a nickname option. You can add it in the name as John “Jackie” Marvin Dough.
Jack Doe would be a name change, I’d add that as a new name and then add the court and date as a source. There’s a drop down on Ancestry for adding a source and it will connect your name change.
I don’t use Ancestry to make changes to my tree, I do it all on my computer and might correct it on Ancestry. I don’t know all that well how to do some of these things on Ancestry. I’ll look at my tree and see if I can find someone with multiple names.
Here’s my two cents as a long time genealogist and sometimes user of Ancestry and other sites.
- Don’t copy information wholesale from other trees unless you are just making a small tree for yourself, you set it entirely private and you are aware that such information is rife with errors due to other people having copied wholesale from someone who copied wholesale from someone who just put in what his grandmother told him based on her extremely inexpert and wrong research.
- You can tie yourself to Ancestry and link things to sources within their ecosystem and have a good experience, but if you ever want to move that is a hassle. It’s a more future proof method to work with a genealogy program on your computer and use the export function there to create a gedcom to add to Ancestry.
- Names are … There’s no perfect solution. Personally I prioritize what they were known as most of their life, with whatever they would have been registered as at birth as the next priority. Other names should be added as additional name variants, as mentioned. I deal mainly with Norwegian ancestry though, where pre 20th century naming customs make even that difficult.
- Document your sources! Always! From the start! It’s the one thing people regret not doing from the start if they keep up the hobby. All of a sudden you start running into connections where contradictory information exists. What you have might be correct, but you might have a hard time figuring out why.
So here’s what it looks like in Ancestry with an alternate name. You have to use the show Name and Gender under Filter in order to get the alternate names to show up.
The Add is where you add the extra Name. When it’s blue it’s pointing to a source. You add those under the Add for Sources.
In the end it really is your tree, if you want to make John Marvin Doe the top name go ahead. What you want to do is make it easiest for you, or someone else you want to show, to be able to understand. As I said before giving sources will make it much easier in a year if you see something and go where did I find THAT at? I’ve done that a few times and some I still can’t figure out where I got that information at.
I’ve definitely been skimping on the sources. What I’ve tried to do is to copy the source materials (census pages, draft cards, etc) into my shoebox, though I admit that I have no idea at the moment where my shoebox is or how to find it.
Front page of Ancestry on the right under Tool and Resources.
You don’t have to add anything there unless it’s something you want to look at much later. I am not paying for Ancestry right now but I think you can usually just add a source from any of their items to a person in your tree. Since I’m not paying I can’t really check to see how to do it though.
You can find a lot of sources for free at FamilySearch • Free Family Trees and Genealogy Archives if you’re not wedded to paying Ancestry.
They also have a shared world tree that you can add to if your family isn’t already there. If your family is already there you get a lot of free research for free. And if you don’t trust it as accurate, which you shouldn’t, since a lot of it is added by careless amateurs you can enjoy fighting others to correct the information.
Other good shared world trees are geni.com and wikitree.com, but familysearch stands out as a hub for the most freely available sources.
Another question for you adepts:
I found a cousin of my mother’s, did some searching on her husband, parents, kids, kids’ spouses, etc. and put them all on my family tree (they show up when I do a “search for all” on my tree) but when I go the tree overview, I can’t find them, probably because I haven’t figured out their relationship to my mom. (My mom’s mom and this cousin’s mom were probably sisters, but I haven’t uncovered any evidence of that yet.) My question is: WHERE on my tree is this branch of my family? And How do I find it on my tree?
By Tree Overview, do you mean the page called Tree Overview, which is a bunch of statistics and links to various views, or the graphical representation of part or all of your tree?
Assuming it’s the latter this branch is not on that tree, because it’s just the parts that connect to the focus person you’ve selected. The common term for this is a floating branch and those aren’t shown in that view.
You could change the focus person and that branch would be what you’d see, but then the part with you would disappear.