Ancestry Frustration

I've been using DNA since 2012, and have taken every test with every major provider, but I get far better results from Ancestry than from all the others combined - and for far less effort,.

Your comments suggest that perhaps you are still trying to do things the way I did for the 5 years before testing with Ancestry - for me they were the bad old days of DNA.

Embrace what Ancestry offers and follow the steps in my Masterclass - then you'll start to appreciate the way they have chosen to do things. Collaborating with cousins is, of course, a key ingredient!

 

Me too, but I also understand why they don't offer those features.

When I got my first car, a second-hand 1965 MGB, I was determined to look after it myself, rather than rely on garages and mechanics - many people did the same in those days. I learned quite a lot about the car, some of which I still remember today, but I also discovered that I was a pretty lousy motor mechanic. Most of the time I was wasting my time, and sometimes I made things worse through my incompetence.

These days you don't need to know what's under the bonnet in order to drive a car, and that's the way I like it. It's also the approach that Ancestry have taken to DNA.

 

I discovered today that you can't search the trees of your Ancestry matches for the surname 'Child' - or rather you can, but it returns the whole lot, even if they don't have a tree. Can anyone think of a way round this that actually works in practice? I tried a couple of things that don't work.

 

It returns everyone who has an ancestor from that location irrespective of their surname - so it's not even a partial solution, unfortunately.

 

In my desperation I had previously tried doing the same using 'Childs' which in the family I'm researching is an alternative spelling of the surname.

Unfortunately searching for similar surnames in the trees of matches has never worked reliably, and it still doesn't. Usually it can be overcome by searching for each variant separately, but not when the surname is one with a special meaning.

From the Masterclass:
"You can’t use wildcards and I suggest you don't check the 'include similar surnames box' either (as in my experience the results are wildly erratic). Instead carry out a separate search for each of the main variants – it will be a lot quicker in the long run."

It's not just 'child' that causes problems - surname searches for 'unknown', 'daughter', 'brother', 'sister', 'father' and 'mother' don't work either, though as I've never come across them as surnames they're unlikely to be a problem for users. But there are other problem words that does exist as surnames, for example 'son', 'blank', and 'tree'. I imagine all of these are the names of variables used by the software.

PS Whilst 'female' doesn't work, 'male' does. Interesting....

 

Another annoying feature, though one that is under the control of the user - provided you are aware that the problem exists......

You will be familiar with Ancestry highlighting shared surnames in green when you view the tree of a DNA match. However, if the tree that you have linked to your DNA results include someone else's tree, for example the tree of your spouse, then those surnames will also be highlighted - which is potentially confusing.

The good news is that when I encountered this issue and confirmed what was going wrong by looking at the tree of the spouse, I noticed a couple of names which are in my own tree - I had inadvertently discovered a cousin!

 

Private trees can be searchable or unsearchable. If someone has a searchable private tree but blocks incoming messages it's bound to cause frustration.
Private trees can be searchable or us