Hidden Tools on Ancestry com

i have five hidden tools that you might not even know exist on ancestry.com but first let me introduce myself 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 i can't wait to show you these hidden genealogical gems but first let me tell you there is a handout for this episode if you want the handout you're going to need to join the channel membership at the information access level in order to get the handouts you can get that and all the handouts on the community tab once you've joined the channel membership all right let's jump to it i've got five of these uh tools that i really want to show you and so i'm super excited about this i call them five hidden tools and it it's not that ancestry is trying to hide them it's that a lot of times they're overlooked and people don't even realize they're there so we're going to jump into it the first one is how to search private trees so what you do is you go up to search and you go to public trees so these are member trees okay but we're going to drill into this area and get to the private trees and from here you could normally search for any public tree by searching uh ancestors names but you can also search privatery so the first thing you're going to want to do is click over here on the right-hand side where it says private member trees now it does say this database contains family trees submitted by ancestor users and have indicated that their tree can only be viewed by ancestry members to whom are granted permission to see their tree so um we're going to jump over there so here we are now you can search for your ancestors over here in the search box and you could get a result if somebody has a private tree with that ancestor in it so let's take a look so the first thing you want to do is you want to type in the name of your ancestor and many of you know i've been researching this one particular ancestor a lot so i'm going to use him as an example and his name was henry gustaf and there he is popping up with the big heart that i use for an emoji and once it populates uh with the information from my tree now you got to remember you got to be on the right tree to do this if you are using the autofill and then i hit search so here we're looking at a list of all private member trees for this ancestor of mine and if i scroll down i have a lot of trees that i can choose from and if i want to contact the owner of the tree see now these are other people within the tree that it's not specific to gustav henley but here's one here i can contact the tree owner and send them a note and say hey it looks like we're researching the same person so that is trick number one uh kind of hidden tool that a lot of people don't use okay so i have four more coming up this one you may have seen before and this has to do with the card catalog and so what i'm gonna do is jump over to the card catalog and here a lot of people don't realize that when they get to this point if they're gonna use the card catalog at all and if you've seen any of my other episodes about the card catalog you know i am a huge fan of the card catalog this is usually where i start first before searching an ancestor through their profile even if you search first through the ancestor profile and then you're hitting a brick wall you've chased all the hints you can come over to the card catalog and do what i'm about to do because this is in my opinion the number one way to search the card catalog and that is to scroll down and search by location and era now you could do one or the other but this will certainly help you break down brick walls when searching this way so let's just pick an ancestor here and i'm going to search in north carolina where i search a lot i'm going to pick anson county and here right without even putting any dates in i've already gotten down to two record sets uh that could contain my ancestors in it and if nothing else it'll give me some background information about anson county so that's my kind of my uh quick and dirty trick for the card catalog is to search by name by location and era now you're going to get different results depending on the place that you're searching clearly you may you may find you have still at this point drilling all the way into accounting you may find that you still have you know 300 results so you may want to filter it down further okay the next one is all hints a lot of people don't realize that there is an area that's called all hints and what you do from your home tab here or actually anywhere in the ancestry platform you can come up here to the leaf and click on the leaf it's going to give you a list of recent hints that have popped up but if you see this where it says see all recent hints in click the down arrow pick the tree that you're working on and this takes you to all of the hints that are available for that tree now keep in mind though that you have filtering options here here i've got 1052 hints there's no way i'm going through all these hints i promise you i'm going to stay targeted my laser focus on the ancestor that i'm researching and so if you want you can certainly hit the drop down and say the most recent you can say sort by last name but first what i want to do is hit the filter tab and i want to filter by last name so let's go with henley which is one i'm researching all the time in a hit search and when we come back uh we have now 103 hints for just the surname henley okay and if we want to we can drill that down even further and i'm searching now for henry henley and i've got it down to two hints these are two hints for people that could or may or may not be uh related to one of the many henry henleys that are in my tree back to a 1052 hints i could then uh search for say davis and see what pops up there here i've got 32 hints now that's not too many to go through and you can choose to ignore or to review all right so to me one of the greatest hidden tools on here is this little drop down uh right here so we're in the all hints view okay we're in my tree all hints and we had sorted this out by davis so now we're down to 32 hints so if we hit this drop down we can say view his hints view his profile or view his tree now what you might want to do if this is a person that you're really focused on and remember you're in your own tree here you can right click open in a new tab and then do it for the second one right click open in a new tab and then do it for the third one right click open in a new tab then all you have to do is pop around between the tabs right here this one just as a reminder the first one was view his hints so here's the first one viewing his hints alone now that has taken us back to the profile view and his hints but sometimes just looking at things differently kind of bends your thinking a little bit in this case it was just taking us to his profile and in this case it was taking us to his uh pedigree view in the tree okay my fourth uh tool that i think is is overlooked and kind of hidden that a lot of people don't may not realize is there is who has saved your records and images and how you would get to that is if we go to the gallery and this is my great grandfather and i have a lot of of records and things that i have uh collected here but we're going to look at this wonderful image this is a sweet image of my great grandparents on their 50th wedding anniversary and one of the things that you can do when you're reviewing your documents is take a look at who saved your images and all you have to do is click over over these little images right here these little circles and click on them and you can see who saved that image and their family tree you can drill straight to their family tree as long as it's public and go see uh what they have because it might be that you can get together and you can collaborate with those other uh researchers about your family history additionally what you can do is uh click into the name of the person and jump over there and message them straight from here and one of the things that i like to do while always when i'm getting ready to think about messaging somebody is i take a look at when they joined and when they last signed on kind of gives me an indication of whether i'll get a response if they haven't signed on in a long time they're probably not as interested or they're not around anymore they may have passed away but if i get a response from them uh through ancestry then you know we can collaborate on on what we're working on with this family okay i'm back on the home screen and the the fifth hidden tool that a lot of people don't realize is there it has to do with dna ethnicity estimates so what i'm going to do is i'm going to pop over to my dna results and once it loads you can pop over to ethnicity estimates under the dna story area and in this view a lot of people don't realize in fact i had demonstrated this a long time ago when they first came out with this new regional map and how it animates and everything a lot of people take a look at the ethnicity estimates and they can bounce around which is fine but what they don't realize is where it says additional communities if you click on here i've got two communities right i've got the ohio river valley and i've got the central appalachian settlers so if i click on let's just say the ohio river valley once it finishes animating it takes me to that region but what a lot of people don't see and they never they never go to that effort to click on those extra communities is there's a timeline here and watch this timeline grow as i scroll down so as you read through some of this information about these different regions there's a whole slideshow this kind of populates also from the story scout area but as you uh cruise on through here you can see the timeline is starting to grow and then it shows you how how the migration patterns are starting to happen and a lot of people had asked me a lot of questions about this particular map and how did i get here and so i'm just i'm pulling it in again because i think that it's kind of fascinating to watch the animation as you scroll down and you read through some of the basic history that ancestry has provided and it shows you some of the ancestors that you have in your tree for those time periods then it starts to show you where these people are starting to populate from based on your dna estimates and more people in your tree more history and as you can see the timeline now is down to 1850 and we keep scrolling down and start showing us more people in the tree and these are all from that ohio valley area and on down and then as we get closer into you know the 1900s we start to see the migration patterns now i know that some of this information is what i put in there based on this gentleman ellsworth lee booth who moved to california so i'm guessing that that line is probably tracing him out there because that's exactly where he moved to and so anyway it's it's just kind of cool it's a nice little hidden trick that a lot of people don't realize i'm going to come up to the top and hit the back arrow and it takes me back to the original ethnicity estimates i can do the same thing with the central appalachia settlers and it gives me a new timeline and this is more of the north carolina tennessee area it looks like so then we scroll down and we see the timeline starting to grow again we start to see the animation uh from this time ireland and on down the way so that's kind of cool uh so just make sure that you are clicking on you're not just seeing it and going okay there it is but that you know it says six possible ancestor stories found three possible ancestor stories found so drill into this do keep in mind that when you are uh looking at some of these migration patterns a lot of this is pulling from your tree because if you'll notice these people that are here and the people that are showing up here are people that i have put in my tree and with that information uh along with some of the genetic ethnicity estimate it's kind of combining the story together so again you'll always have to do the research but um it's kind of giving you an idea of the history and some of the expectations that you can come across while you're researching you can also click on some of these people to see who they are fourth grade grandmother just to give you an idea hey as a reminder there is a handout for this episode all you need to do is click the join button to join the channel membership and choose the information access level in order to get the handouts and then they are located in the community tab right here on the youtube channel all right there are more videos on the screen for your binge watching pleasure so until next time hey thanks for watching

Channel: Genealogy TV

Views: 210,505

Rating: 4.9370079 out of 5

Keywords: Five Hidden Tools on Ancestry, Ancestry.com, Searching Private Trees on Ancestry, Searching the Ancestry Card Catalog, All Hints on Ancestry, Who has Save Your Records and Images on Ancestry?, Ancestry DNA Timelines in Ethnicity Estimates, ancestry questions, ancestry dna, ancestry com search, family tree website, genealogy, family history, genealogy research, family tree, how to find family history, what is genealogy tv, ancestry, genealogist, #familyhistory, #GenealogyTV, #genealogy

Id: t99DXctd3wg

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020