Tuesday, July 28, 2015

More Ancestry.com Record Hints for my Ancestry Member Tree

I wrote Ancestry Green Leaf Hints Keep Sprouting in my Ancestry Member Tree on 15 December 2014.   On that date, my Hints List said there were:

*  All Hints:  39,479
*  People with Hints:  6,629
*  Records:  29,735
*  Photos:  2,980
*  Stories:  531
*  Member Trees:  6,233


The Hints list today is:


Today I have (with the change in parentheses):

*  All Hints:  41,812 (+ 2,323)
*  People with Hints:  7,805 (+1,176)
*  Records:  31,205 (+ 1,870)
*  Photos:  3,320 (+340)
*  Stories:  530 (-1)
*  Member Trees:  6,757 (+ 524)

I have not been lazy about adding or ignoring these Hints to my database.  I'm just behind!  I keep daily records of my Record Hints so that I can determine how many Ancestry adds, on average, each day.  

Since 15 December 2014, I have accepted or ignored 1,844 Hints.  I also caused the Hints system to add 1,418 Hints by expanding the scope of my Ancestry Member Tree.  

Ancestry added 3,314 Record Hints during the 225 days since 15 December 2014.  That's an average of 14.7 Hints added per day.  But they didn't add Hints every day,.  There were some days when no Hints were added, and some days when the number of Hints was reduced for some reason (perhaps a database was removed from the Hint count?).  There were some days when a high number of Hints were added, such as 27 June 2015 when 431 Hints were added; on 8 June 2015, 658 Hints were added; on 21 April 2015, 265 Hints were added.  Take away those three "big Hint" days, and the average number comes down to 8.8 Hints added per day.

I need to work harder on accepting and rejecting Hints.  I have 31,205 Hints to go.  As I go through them, I judge if I should add the information to my RootsMagic database or not.  If it is a Hint based on an actual record (vital, census, military, church, cemetery, etc.) then I add the event, content and source to my RootsMagic database.  If it is an index that I don't want to use (e.g., the Millennial File), or that doesn't have an actual record (e.g., a Find A Grave entry without a burial place), then I just ignore the Hint.

Obviously, I have to accept or reject about 100 Hints a day just to keep up with the seemingly automatic addition of Hints.  Even if I use information from only 20% of the Hints offered (which is about what my average is, I think), that takes an hour or so to add the information to the RootsMagic database.  

I added this Ancestry Member Tree in July 2014, so after one year the Ancestry Hint system has found Hints for at least 7,800 persons in my tree, and probably more since when I accept or reject all of the Hints for a person, the number of persons should reduce by one.  

I love the Hints that Ancestry.com offers!  It reduces the search process.  I find it easier to use the Hints added than to search for each person in my database.  Of course, a Search might find more records, since the Ancestry.com Hints sample only the top 10% (by record count) of the databases available.  That's over 3,300 databases though!

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/07/more-ancestrycom-record-hints-for-my.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.


1 comment:

Jane Bonny said...

Yes, I agree the Hints can be an enormous time saver, except when they aren't. I have been using Ancestry.com since 1998. Lately, I have been getting hints that are my own material, either directly from my tree or from my material in someone else's tree. Typically, it will be a photo or a document scan and will clearly state that I originally contributed the document or photo. Just for one person there are 86 "hints" which are my own uploads. Has anyone else seen this?

At first Ancestry assured me that everything was operating correctly, then they said they could duplicate, then, when I sent them the 86 hints, they acknowledged that maybe it wasn't quite right.