I’m writing in response to Russ Worthington‘s comment on the Genea-Musing’s blog post,
When Did Ancestry.com Last Index Ancestry Member Trees? In the comment, Russ brings up the issue of hints not showing. Since I haven’t noticed an issue with ‘missing’ hints on my un-indexed tree, Russ’s post made me question whether I was indeed missing hints. However, I did notice one difference between my tree and Russ’s experiment. I work with a public tree and Russ’ test was with a private tree.
Thus, I wanted to know whether public trees produced hints when the tree lacked Ancestry sources. Thus, I needed a public tree (small) without Ancestry sources. Since I’ve been searching for Judson Crawford to see if my tree was indexed, I decided to create a small public tree on Ancestry for Judson Crawford, his wife, children and parents.
My first attempt at creating the tree was to drag Judson and his family into a new tree. When I tried to use TreeShare with this new tree, I did not get the option to upload the tree. Instead this small tree was connecting to my large tree on Ancestry.
For my second attempt, I created a Gedcom for Judson and his family. I then imported that gedcom into a new RootsMagic file. Again, I couldn’t use TreeShare to upload this tree to Ancestry.
On the third try, I uploaded the previously created Gedcom to Ancestry. I then used TreeShare to download that tree into RootsMagic. [JudsonTrial2]
Lightbulbs started appearing in the RootsMagic tree shortly after the download completed.
On Ancestry, those same individuals with light bulbs in RootsMagic had hints in Ancestry.
Based on this experience, I would conclude that there might be a difference between private and public trees in the way hints are populated. Unfortunately, the public/private tree status was not the only variable in our two experiments. Russ uploaded his data from his software to Ancestry and I downloaded my experimental tree from Ancestry to my software. In addition, I’m using RootsMagic while Russ is using FamilyTree Maker.
I just created a ‘free’ account on Ancestry and uploaded a small gedcom to create a tree. The hints appeared on the tree almost immediately.
I then tried clicking on some of the hints to see what access a free account has. I tried the 1850 census, the 1860 census and public member trees. In each case, I was taken to a screen prompting me to subscribe. Clicking on any photo also took me to the subscription page.
The Find a Grave hint did take me to the screen with the record information and a link to the Find A Grave site. The 1880 census link also worked.
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