Ancestry's StoryScout - Name Facts - Source Citations - Interview with Crista Cowan at Ancestry

today we are continuing the conversation about ancestry and well this time we're talking about ancestry.com story scout and how to properly put names into profiles you know things like whether to put question marks or quotes you know are those appropriate and then there are some tips about source citations and well how to get them in there the easy way now if this is your first time here my name is connie knox i am a lifelong genealogist here to help you go further faster and factually with your family history research now this is a footnotes episode and i like to call them footnotes because it's in the footnotes where the real sources are and today's real source is ancestry's own christa cowan she is the barefoot genealogist and ancestry's corporate genealogist she is one of my favorite go-to people who is in the know and so let's get some answers to our questions well let's talk about story scout for a minute i have noticed in my own little story scout that it's starting to get more robust are you guys continuing to add more information absolutely yeah story scout we have a team working on it um actually several teams and content and research constantly adding stories and making family connections building out family trees of some of the more notable is the we call them notables notable people throughout history so that people can make those discoveries and find those stories well tell me how exactly is that information pulled together i know that you guys are kind of creating snippets of history and then i'm assuming you're pulling data out of people's out of the ancestor profiles and stuff and going okay this person lived in ohio in the 1920s so let's apply this piece of history to it absolutely yeah yeah you know when you're dealing with so many people coming to the site every day and story scout was primarily designed for new people to help them kind of get that spark of get excited yeah story right um we have to create some kind of computer algorithm that helps us determine that and so yeah as long as you give us um like for new people we asked them to tell us the names of their grandparent or great grandparent who was born before 1940 and based on that we then go out and search other trees to see if anybody has put this person in their tree so that we can see what connections we can make if they haven't we look like you said based on place and time to see what stories we can serve up that we've put together from that location all right let's talk about names and the fact field called names so and i've had a ton of questions about this all right so with regard to names do the question marks that people put in their name so let's say they say robert quote bobby and then their last name does that hurt the algorithm technically yes it does so anytime you put any character in the name fields other than actual letters then it's going to cause the algorithm to look at other things and typically that is because those characters have meaning in computer language that is different than just an alphabet right so for example on ancestry an an asterisk and a question mark are wild cards which means if you have those anywhere in the name field for whatever reason you're going to get probably some pretty wild search results or hints because that's how the computer reads that particular character thank you this is what i've been trying to reinforce for a while and uh so it's it's it's good to hear from you on that so i also am trying to emphasize with people if you're not sure about a name and you put bobby question mark in there that's not cool right i mean that's not going to help any it's only probably going to make things worse as far as the search goes so any of those characters we don't want in there we don't want hashtags we don't want all right so let's talk about what do we do if we have a nickname for example do we have to use the alternate names or do we also do we want to use also known as i think personally i feel like that's a personal choice um however those two things are treated a little differently again by the ancestry search algorithms so if you enter something as an alternate name that is taken into account when you do searches and so typically i use the also known as field not for nicknames but for things like when someone actually changes their name so i do a lot of jewish immigration research that's my research specialty and one of the things that i've learned is that you've got somebody who was born with you know a russian hebrew name and then they come to the united states and they change both their given name and sometimes their surname to a similar but very different name and um so i would put that as an alternate name same thing if you're dealing with somebody who has gone through uh sex change and they've changed like completely changed their name right so would you use that as an alternate name or i would use that as an alternate name yeah okay so then for me i use the also known as for the nicknames that i just personally want to keep track of in that facts field um most nicknames not all but most nicknames ancestry already has built into our name authority dictionary that we use to perform searches so for example robert right it under robert we would have rob and robbie and bob and bobby and all the variant spellings of those things um and probably a dozen others that you haven't even thought of yet that we search when we do that search yeah so also i want to think if i recall i was just trying to look real quick alternate names show right up underneath the name and gender section but also known as doesn't that populate at the bottom yes so alternate names will show up at the top of the facts column and then also known as will be alphabetized with the other facts that are non-date-based i know that one of the big bugaboos that i from for myself and for other people is if you have your own source and you're trying to build a source citation in uh the ancestry platform it can be a little challenging to figure out okay wait a minute like maybe it's a biography that i wrote okay so we gotta figure out the repository we gotta figure out all this other stuff do you have uh the time to give us a walk through on how how we would do that you know what i can give you um a couple of tips that might help okay um the first one is and this is more for new people but i think also some of us who are a little more experienced can get overwhelmed with that as well keep it simple right you do not have to fill in every single field just because a field exists and so i think when people are create creating their own source in their ancestry tree we provide them with that source wizard that we created years ago based off of the work of elizabeth shone mills and and evidence explained and it asks for every piece of possible information and sometimes information just either doesn't exist or we don't have it readily available so keep it as simple as possible that's my first tip my second tip is um around personal sources like in your example a biography usually is published and so there's some publication information even if it hasn't been um distributed so it might not have a repository because there's been no distribution but there might but there should still be publication information most other personal information again journal or something skip all that right because yeah it's about personal knowledge um and i would just always direct people always always to elizabeth's website which is evidenceexplained.com and she's got some quick models there for specifically for citing personal knowledge uh thank you i can write uh you know source citations in my sleep now but it is no offense a little challenging on the ancestry site sometimes it's just time consuming and it's just like i would rather just write the source citation myself and plug it into a uh into the uh comment section or something or in one of the fields there but uh well and i'll tell you my dirty little secret i put it in i just put them in my notes me too if i don't want to take the time to actually craft a well on source citation i will just put it into my notes using one of those quick models usually just copy and paste and then fill in my own information well and a lot of times when you're create if you have to manually create a source citation like that um you might you're gonna might as well write it out anyway because i advocate for creating uh detailed research notes anyway so you're gonna want it in there anyway so you and me both sister well i really appreciate you taking the time today and i think you managed to get every one of my questions answered [Laughter] anytime it's always delightful thank you thank you so much krista for the interview and all the answers to all of our questions we really appreciate it there are more videos on the screen now for your binge watching pleasure and well it is time to say goodbye so until next time keep on climbing your family tree

Channel: Genealogy TV

Views: 3,632

Rating: 4.9039998 out of 5

Keywords: StoryScout, Ancestry’s StoryScout, proper use of names on Ancestry, how to enter a source citation on Ancestry, youtube, ancestry, DNA, familysearch, Myheritage, family tree, findmypast, genealogy, genealogist, family history, ancestry free, genealogy research, DNA research, how to find family history, Genealogy tv, #genealogy, #familyhistory, #genealogytv

Id: H1oXic0Hs4s

Length: 10min 2sec (602 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021