Thanks, Connie... I just wanted to add a little something I find helpful in my research. I always add the burial cemetery name to my records, when I find mention or record of one. I have been able to match family members that way due to the fact that, even over several generations, the burial cemetary remains the same and it helps verify that this is the correct family line. Barbara
If I'm building a family group that goes into the late 1700s I'll see what the dominant info is (what everyone has just copied) and then I'll look at the trees in the next groups for the smaller outlier infomation. I've found the outlier info is often the more correct because it's the minority of researchers actually basing things on documentation. Then of course I retrace the document trail verify as one should.
One of the most common causes for things like a date issue with 1840 and 1849 is transcription errors. We are at the mercy of two issues. 1) Penmanship styles change, usually based on the available tools (reeds, quills, steel nib, etc.) 2) the decline in teaching of cursive. I follow the following rule - If you are in Texas and you hear hoof beats, don't think zebra. Perhaps 95% of the time the transcription is done well. The other 5% of the time we're dealing with two issues what the scribe heard and what the transcriber saw Benjamin.
Perhaps a custom fact could be a year and when finished with focused research and you tag that it is done, include the year such as "2024" to help with determining when a revisit is in order.
I use emoji is a similar way but with a dual function. My tree is so big it’s easier to get lost. 1. I use green for verified, hello for probable and purple for not blood relatives. For example green tick for verified direct ancestor and green circle for verified sibling or yellow circle for unverified sibling. Purple for an adopted sibling, unrelated step sibling or a second marriage. 2. Is the shape. As above ticket is the direct ancestor and circle is for this 1 step out.
Love your processes and your general approach! I'm finding this very helpful. But I do have a quibble. Ignore DNA because it's other peoples' trees? It's true that many components of DNA tools include those. And I understand that many of the lines you are working on are farther back, and DNA may be less helpful than one might think. But ignoring it may mean, in some cases, that although you are chasing your historical family tree, you are missing the biological one. Using DNA to *verify* lines is yet another solid data point. Tracking DNA connections to see if there are anomalies that need to be explained, glitches that point to problems, is very important. You probably already know this. But I don't know that your listeners do.
True. All I’m saying is use it toward the end of the research process. This way you are armed with the most knowledge possible when you do look at DNA. It takes some of the guesswork out of figuring the relationships.
I just cleaned up profile for my gr gr grandparents in NC 1850s. I have been years trying to prove or disprove which Winnifred and James were mine, with every possible 16:38 mix . I have been everywhere from New Bern to Buncombe Co. with repetitive names. Finally nailed it pre marriage 1850s census where they were living 2 properties away. This has been literally years of work.
Thanks Connie - another great class! Do you have any advice on how to tackle cleaning up the gallery? Do you use standard naming conventions? For things like portraits we have in the gallery, should we be making a custom source on the facts page to cite it? There are also so many fields I don't use for various gallery attachment types and dont know if I should be even if I have that info in another places anyway.
Great video! But I wouldn't ignore the DNA portion of researching your family. Though everything might look correct based on the paper trail, the biological relationships might differ. For example, at any generation, the documented parents might not be biologically the parents.
This is true. My documented father isn't my biological father. My mother has no documented connection with my biological father. So without DNA someone that doesn't know me personally would be researching the wrong family line.
Agreed @DanaLeeds Yeah... I guess I could have worded that better. I don't ignore DNA... but for my family I have looked at the DNA cousins so much, that in many cases, I don't need to revisit it again when doing the Profile Makeover. For anyone following the GPS standards, DNA is definitely required.
That's so helpful, thank you Connie! I get so many ideas from your weekly videos :-) I had no idea that emojis could be added in the suffix field - that's such a clever hack.
Do DNA! I spent (wasted) 10 years building out a branch for my maternal great-grandfather. I had records, letters, trees, back to 1650s in America. I never found any DNA cousins on that line, and there should have been many. The paternal name was even carried from 1650 down to my mother! And they all stayed around Colonial New York! I just figured there was some NPE way back. Even on my son's father's line, where you can't trace people before 1870, I have found over 2000 DNA relatives. (Some as close as 1st cousins, some as distant as white slave owners in the 1700s.) So I realized now that something just didn’t make sense. Just out of frustration, in Thrulines, I changed my maternal GGgrandmother to a woman in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn in the 1870s, that had some kind of distant relation to a weak DNA match I couldn’t place, and SUDDENLY, up popped DNA matches in Thrulines. Through those hints I discovered a whole new family branch. My great-grandfather (b. 1907 in Brooklyn) had been unofficially adopted?, stolen? by this other family. Absolutely no birth certificate under any name, no docs anywhere that support this, except 25 plus DNA relatives including cousin matches to that new mother's side (not her husband's). So what I thought was an old NPE was a very RECENT different event, that caused me to waste 10 years (500 people on that branch!)
The Quaker meeting notes are interesting. I learned about the old-style dates from researching these notes. But I had to make a notation in my profiles facts as to the use of the old-style dates. Ancestry doesn't like when we use 1750/1751, so I would use the first year (1750) in the Fact date box for the birth, marriage, or death date and then make a note that this was the old-style calendar and show the date as 1750/1751. How have you dealt with this? I've also run into some difficulty in determining the correct month. If March 25 is the first day of the new year, then when you get to September, it is not the ninth month but November. Glad they finally made a decision on which calendar to use that doesn't cause so much confusion!
I had all the records to prove two of my ancestors were mine. But DNA uncovered that they actually weren't my ancestors. So I disagree and think DNA research for the first 4-5 generations is crucial to your research.
I don't use DNA at all. I find that people who do a DNA test first, and then construct a tree, can sometimes have the sloppiest attitude towards accuracy of the genealogical details, so I wouldn't want to rely on tree 'facts' from a tree like that. And after the first 5 generations, then what? You are back to relying on documentation anyway. My tree goes back 15 generations (to 1537 at the moment), and you can't use DNA to confirm or link with anyone else's relatives that far back.
@@HistoricalPixie-ft9yy, I found two NPE's in my family (both at the great grandparent level) using DNA after enough test takers had tested. I use it to confirm the first 4-5 generations and to break down brick walls. I am currently using DNA to uncover the parents of my 3rd great great grandfather (one of my NPE lines). I have a cousin list of over 2,000 cousin matches (half known and half unknown). I am building out research trees to find their common ancestors. This is the same process I used to uncover the parents of my 3rd great grandmother. But yes, after 5 generations, it's useless. And I don't rely on messy incomplete trees while doing my research. I started my genealogy research in 1996, before DNA. My tree goes back farther through my confirmed line through James IV - but that is the only line that goes back that far. Most of my lines barely go past my 5th great grandparents - because of hard to find sources.
Soooo (adoptee here), if you’re raised by someone who you assign as your parent, but later find the biological parentage is different, does NOT mean you must or have to abandon the research on the non-bloodline because for the place in the family for what everyone knows and remembers, the bio link is irrelevant. It only becomes relevant if you’re also tracing bloodlines and using DNA too. Fortunately you have the ability to edit and define complex relationships of parents, and set the preferred parent for the logical flow of the tree and hints. Now, if, like me, you’re adopted by relatives, then your relationship reports to those people will be wonky in the online version regardless of what you perceive as reality. I haven’t found a way yet to fix that. Maybe it’s a bug. Anyway, my point is don’t ignore the family that raised you. They are still your family, and still have a place in your tree.
Great and helpful video. On that Quaker marriage index what had a different date... I see you kept the 2nd fact pointing to that source. Would you also edit the fact and add to the description that you believe the date to be an error in the source. That way, when you come back years later, you will know why it's there?
One hint I regularly use is to click the [search] button at the top-right of the profile. As well as performing a search for records relating to that person, at the top of the results are those you've already saved to the profile, including what name is on that record, including any second names, middle initials, spelling variants - and in the case of married women, both their married and maiden names. The only emoji I use in the suffix field is a 'no entry' symbol for people I'm only related to by marriage, to indicate to me that I'm not researching _their_ ancestry. I'd love to use that field for flag emojis of birth locations, but unfortunately they won't show when using any PC-based web-browser, to my knowledge.
I've heard if you are syncing with Family Tree Maker (FTM) that emojis will cause it to fail. So it might not be a good idea for Gedcom exports either.
Must all Alternate facts be removed? Uncertainty is part of historiography, we cannot escape it. *Documenting that uncertainty is a big part of writing history.*
Duh..... After All These Years.... "Turn on name and gender", and it goes across the full tree! How did I miss this?!? No more having to navigate to 'quick edit'. Thanks!
A bond is a legal bond ensuring the clearance to marry. In other words the groom and bondsman guarantee the groom is not already married. If so, he owes the value of the bond to the court not to mention other legal and familial issues.
found an ancester and article stating he died at Port Hudson Seige during Civil war, however someone doing genealogy for Stephentown NY shows this ancester as having children born after the war. Is there a list of people who died at that seige. I cannot find anything past 1863 that matches for that person and don't see where the genealogy person got their info. Any FREE suggestions? I am thinking maybe they were supposed to be on the wounded list, not died list.
Connie, you mentioned the media gallery. I use that often, for the main reason you suggested. However, I worry that some photos in my ‘public’ tree are exposed to other researchers. Especially photos of living people that I use as ‘profile pictures’. Is there ANY way that I can have a public tree & a private media gallery for living people? Suggestions?Or can I designate some media as ‘private’. This has bothered me for some time and I have found no solution. Can you help?
thank you so much! The FTM privacy designation worked perfectly. I just went into the media gallery and added the privacy designation anything I would rather not share. This was a great help & fabulous tip!
I have had Ancestry for many years with something like 2K entries. I love your tips/advise but my screens (Mac user) look nothing like any of yours. I have looking at settings but while I can see individual similar screens, I cannot find anything with combo links like you have (I.e. fact-source-parents; MaryC Hale). Do you have some advanced version?
Connie, how do you handle a file with multiple pages when you clean up the profile? Do you keep a link to each page, or is the first page of the file enough to access the entire file of documents? I'm thinking about an estate file or military record.
I'm not clear if you are talking about research notes when referring to multiple pages. I keep links to everything everywhere if possible. But I also write good source citations in my notes because links break over time.
@@GenealogyTV I mean attaching documents to a profile on Ancestry. Do you attach every page of a military record or just the first? Ancestry hints gives me each page separately, so I'm not sure how to handle it.
@@GenealogyTV Military records from Fold3 have multiple pages, Ancestry shows them as individual pages rather than a complete file. Do you keep a link to each page on the profile page of your ancestor, or is it enough to save the first page. I have all the pages for my own research notes.
Thanks, Connie... I just wanted to add a little something I find helpful in my research. I always add the burial cemetery name to my records, when I find mention or record of one. I have been able to match family members that way due to the fact that, even over several generations, the burial cemetary remains the same and it helps verify that this is the correct family line. Barbara
If I'm building a family group that goes into the late 1700s I'll see what the dominant info is (what everyone has just copied) and then I'll look at the trees in the next groups for the smaller outlier infomation. I've found the outlier info is often the more correct because it's the minority of researchers actually basing things on documentation. Then of course I retrace the document trail verify as one should.
I haven't seen emojis in the facts before. It's a great idea. A helpful video to get back to the basics and clean up profiles. Thanks!
Glad it was helpful!
One of the most common causes for things like a date issue with 1840 and 1849 is transcription errors. We are at the mercy of two issues. 1) Penmanship styles change, usually based on the available tools (reeds, quills, steel nib, etc.) 2) the decline in teaching of cursive. I follow the following rule - If you are in Texas and you hear hoof beats, don't think zebra. Perhaps 95% of the time the transcription is done well. The other 5% of the time we're dealing with two issues what the scribe heard and what the transcriber saw Benjamin.
Perhaps a custom fact could be a year and when finished with focused research and you tag that it is done, include the year such as "2024" to help with determining when a revisit is in order.
Interesting idea
I use emoji is a similar way but with a dual function. My tree is so big it’s easier to get lost.
1. I use green for verified, hello for probable and purple for not blood relatives. For example green tick for verified direct ancestor and green circle for verified sibling or yellow circle for unverified sibling. Purple for an adopted sibling, unrelated step sibling or a second marriage.
2. Is the shape. As above ticket is the direct ancestor and circle is for this 1 step out.
This is the episode I never knew I needed!! Thank you so much for these videos.
You're so welcome!
Love your processes and your general approach! I'm finding this very helpful.
But I do have a quibble.
Ignore DNA because it's other peoples' trees?
It's true that many components of DNA tools include those.
And I understand that many of the lines you are working on are farther back, and DNA may be less helpful than one might think.
But ignoring it may mean, in some cases, that although you are chasing your historical family tree, you are missing the biological one.
Using DNA to *verify* lines is yet another solid data point.
Tracking DNA connections to see if there are anomalies that need to be explained, glitches that point to problems, is very important.
You probably already know this. But I don't know that your listeners do.
True. All I’m saying is use it toward the end of the research process. This way you are armed with the most knowledge possible when you do look at DNA. It takes some of the guesswork out of figuring the relationships.
Thank you Connie, you answered one of my questions about the children's death certificate being on the parents profiles.❤
I just cleaned up profile for my gr gr grandparents in NC 1850s. I have been years trying to prove or disprove which Winnifred and James were mine, with every possible 16:38 mix . I have been everywhere from New Bern to Buncombe Co. with repetitive names. Finally nailed it pre marriage 1850s census where they were living 2 properties away. This has been literally years of work.
Nice
Thanks Connie - another great class! Do you have any advice on how to tackle cleaning up the gallery? Do you use standard naming conventions? For things like portraits we have in the gallery, should we be making a custom source on the facts page to cite it? There are also so many fields I don't use for various gallery attachment types and dont know if I should be even if I have that info in another places anyway.
Tag people. It helps with search.
Great video! But I wouldn't ignore the DNA portion of researching your family. Though everything might look correct based on the paper trail, the biological relationships might differ. For example, at any generation, the documented parents might not be biologically the parents.
This is true. My documented father isn't my biological father. My mother has no documented connection with my biological father. So without DNA someone that doesn't know me personally would be researching the wrong family line.
Agreed @DanaLeeds Yeah... I guess I could have worded that better. I don't ignore DNA... but for my family I have looked at the DNA cousins so much, that in many cases, I don't need to revisit it again when doing the Profile Makeover. For anyone following the GPS standards, DNA is definitely required.
Thank you. Love the emojis
That's so helpful, thank you Connie! I get so many ideas from your weekly videos :-) I had no idea that emojis could be added in the suffix field - that's such a clever hack.
Glad it was helpful!
Do DNA! I spent (wasted) 10 years building out a branch for my maternal great-grandfather. I had records, letters, trees, back to 1650s in America. I never found any DNA cousins on that line, and there should have been many. The paternal name was even carried from 1650 down to my mother! And they all stayed around Colonial New York! I just figured there was some NPE way back.
Even on my son's father's line, where you can't trace people before 1870, I have found over 2000 DNA relatives. (Some as close as 1st cousins, some as distant as white slave owners in the 1700s.)
So I realized now that something just didn’t make sense. Just out of frustration, in Thrulines, I changed my maternal GGgrandmother to a woman in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn in the 1870s, that had some kind of distant relation to a weak DNA match I couldn’t place, and SUDDENLY, up popped DNA matches in Thrulines.
Through those hints I discovered a whole new family branch. My great-grandfather (b. 1907 in Brooklyn) had been unofficially adopted?, stolen? by this other family. Absolutely no birth certificate under any name, no docs anywhere that support this, except 25 plus DNA relatives including cousin matches to that new mother's side (not her husband's).
So what I thought was an old NPE was a very RECENT different event, that caused me to waste 10 years (500 people on that branch!)
The Quaker meeting notes are interesting. I learned about the old-style dates from researching these notes. But I had to make a notation in my profiles facts as to the use of the old-style dates. Ancestry doesn't like when we use 1750/1751, so I would use the first year (1750) in the Fact date box for the birth, marriage, or death date and then make a note that this was the old-style calendar and show the date as 1750/1751. How have you dealt with this? I've also run into some difficulty in determining the correct month. If March 25 is the first day of the new year, then when you get to September, it is not the ninth month but November. Glad they finally made a decision on which calendar to use that doesn't cause so much confusion!
Use the description to detail the date as written in the document as well.
@@GenealogyTV That's helpful. Thanks! I learn so much from you and I appreciate the fact that you are so willing to share your knowledge.
I had all the records to prove two of my ancestors were mine. But DNA uncovered that they actually weren't my ancestors. So I disagree and think DNA research for the first 4-5 generations is crucial to your research.
It is important, just not the first thing I do.
@@GenealogyTV, it's not the first thing I do either. You need documents first. Then DNA is the backup to those records.
I don't use DNA at all. I find that people who do a DNA test first, and then construct a tree, can sometimes have the sloppiest attitude towards accuracy of the genealogical details, so I wouldn't want to rely on tree 'facts' from a tree like that. And after the first 5 generations, then what? You are back to relying on documentation anyway. My tree goes back 15 generations (to 1537 at the moment), and you can't use DNA to confirm or link with anyone else's relatives that far back.
@@HistoricalPixie-ft9yy, I found two NPE's in my family (both at the great grandparent level) using DNA after enough test takers had tested. I use it to confirm the first 4-5 generations and to break down brick walls. I am currently using DNA to uncover the parents of my 3rd great great grandfather (one of my NPE lines). I have a cousin list of over 2,000 cousin matches (half known and half unknown). I am building out research trees to find their common ancestors. This is the same process I used to uncover the parents of my 3rd great grandmother. But yes, after 5 generations, it's useless. And I don't rely on messy incomplete trees while doing my research. I started my genealogy research in 1996, before DNA. My tree goes back farther through my confirmed line through James IV - but that is the only line that goes back that far. Most of my lines barely go past my 5th great grandparents - because of hard to find sources.
Soooo (adoptee here), if you’re raised by someone who you assign as your parent, but later find the biological parentage is different, does NOT mean you must or have to abandon the research on the non-bloodline because for the place in the family for what everyone knows and remembers, the bio link is irrelevant. It only becomes relevant if you’re also tracing bloodlines and using DNA too. Fortunately you have the ability to edit and define complex relationships of parents, and set the preferred parent for the logical flow of the tree and hints.
Now, if, like me, you’re adopted by relatives, then your relationship reports to those people will be wonky in the online version regardless of what you perceive as reality. I haven’t found a way yet to fix that. Maybe it’s a bug.
Anyway, my point is don’t ignore the family that raised you. They are still your family, and still have a place in your tree.
Many thanks. Lots of good info.
ALL THE TIME!!!
Great and helpful video. On that Quaker marriage index what had a different date... I see you kept the 2nd fact pointing to that source. Would you also edit the fact and add to the description that you believe the date to be an error in the source. That way, when you come back years later, you will know why it's there?
I would keep that in my research notes for sure and sometimes I'll add a note in the description of the fact for others to find.
One hint I regularly use is to click the [search] button at the top-right of the profile. As well as performing a search for records relating to that person, at the top of the results are those you've already saved to the profile, including what name is on that record, including any second names, middle initials, spelling variants - and in the case of married women, both their married and maiden names.
The only emoji I use in the suffix field is a 'no entry' symbol for people I'm only related to by marriage, to indicate to me that I'm not researching _their_ ancestry. I'd love to use that field for flag emojis of birth locations, but unfortunately they won't show when using any PC-based web-browser, to my knowledge.
How do your emoji characters affect a GEDCOM file that might be extracted?
I've heard if you are syncing with Family Tree Maker (FTM) that emojis will cause it to fail. So it might not be a good idea for Gedcom exports either.
I'm not able to see how you created your research notes. Are you using an outside program or is something linked to Ancestry?
MS Word for research notes.
Must all Alternate facts be removed? Uncertainty is part of historiography, we cannot escape it. *Documenting that uncertainty is a big part of writing history.*
No. It’s your tree. Do as you think is appropriate.
Duh.....
After All These Years....
"Turn on name and gender", and it goes across the full tree!
How did I miss this?!?
No more having to navigate to 'quick edit'.
Thanks!
what is difference between "marriage bond" & engagement>??>
It's the same. Think of it as today's marriage license.
A bond is a legal bond ensuring the clearance to marry. In other words the groom and bondsman guarantee the groom is not already married. If so, he owes the value of the bond to the court not to mention other legal and familial issues.
found an ancester and article stating he died at Port Hudson Seige during Civil war, however someone doing genealogy for Stephentown NY shows this ancester as having children born after the war. Is there a list of people who died at that seige. I cannot find anything past 1863 that matches for that person and don't see where the genealogy person got their info. Any FREE suggestions? I am thinking maybe they were supposed to be on the wounded list, not died list.
Try state archives.
Connie, you mentioned the media gallery. I use that often, for the main reason you suggested. However, I worry that some photos in my ‘public’ tree are exposed to other researchers. Especially photos of living people that I use as ‘profile pictures’. Is there ANY way that I can have a public tree & a private media gallery for living people? Suggestions?Or can I designate some media as ‘private’. This has bothered me for some time and I have found no solution. Can you help?
The only way I know of is to use something like Family Tree Maker where you can set some items as private and they won’t sync with Ancestry.
thank you so much! The FTM privacy designation worked perfectly. I just went into the media gallery and added the privacy designation anything I would rather not share. This was a great help & fabulous tip!
I have had Ancestry for many years with something like 2K entries. I love your tips/advise but my screens (Mac user) look nothing like any of yours. I have looking at settings but while I can see individual similar screens, I cannot find anything with combo links like you have (I.e. fact-source-parents; MaryC Hale). Do you have some advanced version?
Not necessarily.
Are your notes kept within Ancestry or somewhere else?
In my file. I write them in word.
Connie, how do you handle a file with multiple pages when you clean up the profile? Do you keep a link to each page, or is the first page of the file enough to access the entire file of documents? I'm thinking about an estate file or military record.
I'm not clear if you are talking about research notes when referring to multiple pages. I keep links to everything everywhere if possible. But I also write good source citations in my notes because links break over time.
@@GenealogyTV I mean attaching documents to a profile on Ancestry. Do you attach every page of a military record or just the first? Ancestry hints gives me each page separately, so I'm not sure how to handle it.
@@GenealogyTV Military records from Fold3 have multiple pages, Ancestry shows them as individual pages rather than a complete file. Do you keep a link to each page on the profile page of your ancestor, or is it enough to save the first page. I have all the pages for my own research notes.
Can we do this in FS?
Kind of but keep in mind it is a collaborative tree that others have contributed to.