Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Ancestry.com iPhone/iPad App - Filters Work!

On my post Ancestry's iPhone App has a New Look (20 August 2012), Branden Neish of Ancestry'com commented:

"I wanted to bring up one additional set of features that you and your audience may be particularly interested in. When you tap on the 3 bars on the top left of the screen, an alphabetized list of all people in your tree is shown. Tap on the "All People" button to reveal several options: Direct Ancestors, End of Line, Living Relatives, All Hints, and Recent Hints. By tapping on one of these filters, the list of people is updated to show only those that apply. Tapping on one of the individuals in the list brings up the tree with that person selected as the focus person."

I had missed the "3 bars" icon at the top left of the screen, and decided to go explore this feature.  Here is what I found (it wasn't exactly what Branden described above):

1)  On the "Family Tree" view of the App, you can see the "3 bars" icon to the left of the Ancestry Member Tree title:



2)  Tapping on the "3 bars" icon, the user sees a list of different "Filter Types:"


The "Filter Types" listed are "All People," "Direct Ancestors," "End of Line," "Living Relatives," "All Hints," and "Recent Hints."

3)  I tapped the "All People" line and saw a list of the persons in this specific Ancestry Member Tree:


I could scroll down to find a specific person, tap on the person's name, and see the Person profile.

4)  I tapped the "Back" arrow key (lower right-hand corner of the screen above, I could have tapped the down arrow on the "All People" line) and went back to the "Filter Type" screen and tapped on the "All Hints" line:


This lists the names of persons with Hints, in alphabetical order, and the number of Hints for each person on the list.

A user can go back to the "Family Tree" view at any time by tapping the "3 bars" icon in the top right of the "Filter Type" screens.

5)  I tapped the name "Love Brewster" which had one Hint listed (in the above screen), but it really had 15 Hints:


I think that this is a wonderful addition to the Ancestry.com App!  This will be very useful to me while searching for Hints.

Thank you, Ancestry.com, and Branden for taking the time to tell me about it.

Note:  I made these screens on Monday night, and had 109 Hints in this database at that time.  Today, when I checked the App again, I have 4,023 Hints!  I wonder what happened?  Many of my Massachusetts colonials have over 20 Hints.  Not all of them are ones I want to attach to persons in my tree, however.  I will take a look at the Hints offered for an early colonial ancestor in a future post.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/08/ancestrycom-iphoneipad-app-filters.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

2 comments:

Kay Haden said...

Ancestry may have changed/added to their algorithms for hint searching in the past two days or so. My hints have also multiplied. I have three small private trees. As of yesterday two of them had 0 hints - today both have between 40-80. The number has increased during the day today and I've noticed databases that I don't believe have been searched in the past. I have also noticed that as I add legitimate hints, additional ones are sometimes found within minutes.

Rosemary said...

They just added a buncha records to this Mass. database. http://search.ancestry.com/iexec/?htx=List&dbid=2495