Hints on Ancestry

When researching your family history you may notice hints on Ancestry.com connected to the relatives listed on your family tree diagram.

In this blog article I will go over:

• What are hints on Ancestry?
• Where do these hints come from?
• What to do if the hints are for the wrong person

To learn all about these little leaf hints, please keep reading!

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|Related Article: Our Family Tree Book

What are Hints on Ancestry?

Ancestry hints are first noticeable as little leaf icons next to your ancestor’s name in the overall family tree chart and also if you view the specific ancestor’s profile.

These leaf symbols indicate that there is a hint of information that you may find helpful for your research.

Once you go to your ancestor’s profile page and click either the symbol or word “hints” you will see a list of these hint items.

Click “review ” to look through the details, images, and sources to see if the information matches your loved one.

Next you decide to either confirm the hint should be connected to that family member, decline that is does not match, or ignore the hint.

Ancestry.com has a box that says, “Would you like to save this information to your family tree? Yes, No, Maybe”

If you select Yes, you will see a side-by-side comparison of “record details” and “your tree details”

Next click “save to tree” and the record will be added to your ancestor’s profile.

Now going back a few steps, if you were to click “Maybe” it will move the hint to an “undecided” tab on the ancestor’s profile.

If you choose “No” you will no longer be provided that hint record.

I only recommend selecting No if you are absolutely certain that the information does not match.

Review versus Ignore

When being shown the option to Review or Ignore the hint, if you select “ignore” the record will go to a tab labeled “ignored” on your ancestor’s profile.

So you can always go back and view it again if you reconsider.

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Where do Ancestry Hints come from?

The hints provided by Ancestry primarily come from two sources:

• Indexed Records
• Other Ancestry.com members

Indexed records are essentially documents, files, images, and resources that have been digitized within the Ancestry database.

The system, so to speak, is noticing similarities between records on file and the information on your family tree. For example, your ancestor’s name.

So it is showing you basically- this may match your relative, check it out!

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Public Member Records

The second source for hints is sometimes other Ancestry.com members’ public family tree(s).

Just a word of caution, always be careful when choosing if you’d like to save the other person’s research to your tree.

Unfortunately sometimes other members get a little too excited (which is great!) but they save things to their ancestor that may not be correct if they aren’t fully reading the details and source information.

Ancestry Hints for the Wrong Person

This leads to my next important note.

On an occasion you will receive hints that are not correct for your family tree.

It could be that another person’s name is similar or a similar location or dates, but not necessarily the same ancestor.

Another common error is receiving a record for the wrong generation.

For example if a father and son share the same name, it can easily become confusing.

To navigate around this simply try your best to fact check the details and refer to the source of where the information originated.

Also don’t completely ignore it all together because you may realize down the road that it does match someone in your tree, just not the profile it was originally listed on.

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Conclusion

I hope this blog article was able to help explain what hints on Ancestry are and how to use them for building your family tree!

If you have any questions please be sure to comment below or reach out to me on pinterest or youtube!

To sign up, visit https://www.ancestry.com/

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