Over the past 10 months, I have had issues with my Ancestry tree, Heartland Genealogy, not being indexed. (Please see my June 2018 post, Tree Indexing Update, for background on this issue.) Now, I’m beginning to see evidence that my tree is indexed – at least some of the time.
To test whether my tree has been indexed, I have been using a free login to do an exact search of Public Member Trees for Judson Foster Crawford. This search has consistently produced 24 trees. My tree is not listed among these results suggesting that my tree hasn’t been indexed.
I recently noticed that when I search all collections for someone in my tree, one of the results is a ‘Matching Person (from family trees). When I tried my same Judson Foster Crawford search for all collections from the free account, the very first result is a link to my tree on my paid account.
To verify that I am using a free account for the search, I clicked on the link to Judson Foster Crawford in my tree. This took me to a page where I could purchase access to Ancestry.
Hoping that this wasn’t a fluke, I tried another search with the name Edward Grant Briles. I received a link to Edward Grant Briles in my tree when searching all collections but my tree wasn’t listed when searching only the public member trees. I then tried a similar search for Ozias Wells — and my tree did not show up with either search. I repeated the ‘test’ with the name Charles Oliver Mentzer. This produced a link to Charles Oliver Mentzer in my tree when searching all collections but my tree was not listed when searching ‘public member trees’.
At this point, it looks like my tree may come up when searching all collections but not when searching Public Member Trees. My initial theory as to why Ozias Wells did not show up in a search of all collections but searches for Judson Foster Crawford, Edward Grant Briles and Charles Oliver Mentzer did produce links to my tree was based on thinking that I had not worked the Ancestry hints for Ozias Wells while having accepted hints for the other ancestors. However, I don’t have a shaky leaf for Ozias Wells and I have accepted eight hints.
Just to make sure my tree is still public, I checked the privacy settings for my Heartland Genealogy tree.
Can anyone explain why
- My tree doesn’t come up when searching only Public Member Trees, but a person in my tree may come up when searching all collections (same search criteria used)?
- When searching all collections for some individuals in my tree, the results will show a link to that individual in may tree — but won’t for others in my tree?
Ancestry search function seems to have many bugs in it. I searched for a person in the 1850 census and he did not show up in the results. So I went directly to the documents and there he was on page 25 of 28, indexed correctly and everything. We are not the only ones with troubles like this. I don’t know why they don’t get to the root of the problem.
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