Ancestry hints

Whereabouts are you seeing this John?

Do you mean this?

 

I don't know whether Tim has correctly deduced what JohnR65 is referring to, but when referring to new features at Ancestry always include at least one example, because they are usually trialled with a subset of users before being rolled out - which could mean that 90% of the forum membership are going to waste time looking for something that they don't yet have.

 

Hi John,

This is what I see:

The right click (options shown in the snapshot) isn't for finding relatives but shortcuts/navigation to different options. Am I missing something?
So to answer your question, I think it's a good feature to have

 

They are the same options that we get in the other tree views. As far as I can see, only the fan view is new.

I'd never seen the point of the fan view in the past, but seeing it now I think it could be useful for DNA, as it can highlight the ancestral lines that I share with a particular cousin.

 

Everyone seems to use Ancestry differently. I don't often look at hints, but I'm not aware that there is an extra click - perhaps that only applies when you're accessing them from your tree?

What I do know is that, contrary to the assertion that Ancestry make things more time-consuming in order to keep people on the site longer, they are highly-focused on delivering the best user-experience. After all, they may be the biggest genealogy company the world has ever seen, but they do have some strong competitors - and there's always the potential for competition from companies like Alphabet (Google) or Meta (Facebook) which aren't currently in the market, but have the technology, the brand awareness, and the access to billions of customers.

Something else that we often forget on this forum is that many of Ancestry's users access their site through the app, not on a computer - so some of the changes we see may be designed to maintain compatibility between the two experiences.

[I have changed the title of this thread to 'Ancestry hints' rather than 'Ancestry tips', since that seems to be what it's about, and moved it to the Ancestry area of the forum, rather than Ask Peter - otherwise we could end up with two separate discussions on the same topic.]

 

It's not quite true to say that Ancestry do not record the source for the 1911 Census; in fact they give the Piece Number, the Registration District Number, and the Enumeration District Number as part of their transcription, and the TNA reference RG14 is under the Source tab. It's the schedule number that hasn't been transcribed, but - as you say - it is in the top right corner of the schedule, so not hard to find. I certainly hope that there is nobody reading this who takes information from transcripts without checking the source images when they are so readily available.

However, because the schedule number hasn't been transcribed you can't search by schedule number (which is why at LostCousins we use Findmypast for checking the 1911 England & Wales census entries). If anyone has noted their 1911 information but not recorded the census references they can get the information free from FamilySearch, whose England & Wales census transcriptions are provided by Findmypast (even, ironically, the 1881 census).

The 1911 Census was an unusual project for Ancestry, partly because they collaborated with The Genealogist, and partly because they digitized and indexed the summary sheets before the schedules. As it happens, the transcriptions of the summary sheets do include the schedule numbers.

I'm not aware of any missing records, but it wouldn't surprise me if a few schedules are missing given the size of the project and the limited time that Findmypast had. Are you talking about records which exist, but are missing from the database, or records that you are unable to find, so might or might not be missing?

'Better' is a relative term: we all have different expectations. But one thing I can say is that those who expect perfection are doomed to be continually disappointed - the reality is that people make mistakes (and that includes everyone reading this).

 

I don't know anyone who would recommend that you subscribe to MyHeritage if you have limited funds. I've never subscribed and so far nobody has been able to convince me that this is a bad decision.

As for Findmypast, get your facts right! They offer 1 month and 3 month subscriptions which are not that much more expensive, bearing in mind that you not only have the flexibility to take a break during periods when you have less time to spend on family history, you can also switch between different subscription levels. (Few British researchers need year-round access to international records, newspapers, or the 1921 Census.)

Many people seem to manage with one annual subscription, supplemented by visits to the public library and/or occasional one-month subs to Ancestry/Findmypast.

Family history is one of the cheaper hobbies and, considering how many more records are online these days, subscriptions to the major sites are better value than they have ever been, especially if you allow for inflation. My first Ancestry subscription 21 years ago cost about £65 (around £130 in today's money), for which I got ONE England & Wales census (1891), NO parish registers (just a few digitized books), and not much else, not even the GRO indexes. I spent a fortune on travelling to various record offices, and hundreds of hours looking up records that I can now find online in minutes or seconds for a fraction of the cost, thanks to Ancestry and/or Findmypast.

 

I use MyHeritage for DNA only at the moment. To date there has never been a compelling reason to buy a subscription.

Findmypast used to offer only 6 or 12 month subscriptions - that changed about 10 years ago, when they introduced shorter options.

£169.99 is the cost of a Premium subscription after deducting 15% Loyalty Discount; a quarterly Premium subscription would cost £239.96 in total (monthly Premium subscriptions are not available). But if you don't need newspapers, worldwide records, or the 1921 Census for 12 months of the year, consider downgrading for the rest of the time. A quarterly Plus subscription is £38.49 (£153.96 for a year).

 

Presumably they don't have a contract with TNA for that record set. You see the same thing with the Scottish censuses at Ancestry & Findmypast.