Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Progress in Adding Census Records to My Ancestry Member Tree and RootsMagic Database

As noted in Demonstrating Adding Ancestry.com Hints in a Specific Database to my RootsMagic Database (posted 30 October 2014), I have been methodically adding content and source citations to my family tree database in RootsMagic 6 using Ancestry.com Hints from specific databases.

I chose this method because the Ancestry Hints are for specific persons in my Ancestry Member Tree.  Almost every Hint is correct (1 to 2% not correct), which saves me search time, and I can add the Census Fact to every person in the household by copying and pasting.  Using this process, I've also added many spouses and children to persons in my database, in addition to the source citations.  I already had Census Facts for most of my ancestral families, but I had very few for the other families in my database (which includes one-name studies for Seaver, Auble, Carringer, Vaux, Dill, Buck, etc.).

In the process, I finished the 365 Hints I had for the 1940 U.S. Census by 4 November.

Currently, i'm working through the 1930 U.S. Census.  I had 656 Hints when I started on 5 November, and am done to 428  as of today.  I'm doing 30-50 of them in one to two hours, which includes multiple family members.  Here is the current 1930 U.S. Census status:


I will continue this process over the next year or two in the following databases on Ancestry.com:

*  1920 U.S. Census (dbid = 6061) - 770 Hints
*  1910 U.S. Census (dbid = 7884) - 905 Hints
*  1900 U.S. Census (dbid = 7602) - 1050 Hints
*  1880 U.S. Census (dbid = 6742) - 1062 Hints
*  1870 U.S. Census (dbid = 7163) - 717 Hints
*  1860 U.S. Census (dbid = 7667) - 701 Hints
*  1850 U.S. Census (dbid = 8054) - 729 Hints

*  Social Security Death Index (dbid = 3693) - 298 Hints**
*  Find A Grave (dbid = 60525) - 1394 Hints**
*  World War I Draft Registration (dbid = 6482) - 164 Hints
*  Pennsylvania and New Jersey Church and Town Records (dbid = 2451) - 24 Hints
*  Massachusetts Town and Vital Records (dbid = 2495) - 2430 Hints
*  California Birth Index, 1905-1995 (dbid = 5247) - 64 Hints
*  California Death Index, 1940-1997 (dbid = 5180) - 193 Hints
*  California Marriage Index, 1960-1985 (dbid = 1144) - 15 Hints

**  I did these databases earlier using the MyHeritage Record Matches, so I probably won't do them again.  There are probably some entries that I don't have since my Ancestry tree has about 8% more persons than my MyHeritage tree has.

That should keep me busy for the next year or two.  I will probably do the California birth, marriage and deaths next because the number of Hints are small, and the records may lead to more content.

I know that I don't have ALL of the Hints that are, or will be, available for the 42,920 persons in my Ancestry Member Tree.  Ancestry seems to be adding 5-10 Hints every day (I'm tracking them).  I currently have 29,840 Record Hints and 39,552 Total Hints.  I expect those numbers to at least double over the next five years as they find more for existing persons and new persons in my tree, and as they add new databases.  I try to keep on top of these now, adding content from the most recent ones when I don't have it in the database.

 I chose to work with the Hints in this manner because I find it to be the most efficient way to add source citations to persons in my database.  I don't have to search, I just enter information and create a source citation.  This works well for me.

How are you doing with your Ancestry.com Hints?  How many do you have?  How do you "clear" them?

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/11/progress-in-adding-census-records-to-my.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting post! I like these. So I went to my Ancestry tree and see that the hints are building up. How do you know how many of each different record type you have? Mine are all mixed in together.

Diane Gould Hall said...

Hi Randy - I've been following these posts about Ancestry hints. I do not make an effort to clear mine, as there are too many and many are for 4th x removed cousins whom I won't take the time for. However, that being said, I am going to follow your instructions and work on one database at a time and see what gems I can uncover.
My current tree status is: 11,421 hints for 2,485 people in my tree. My whole tree is just over 3,000, so you can see that most of them have hints.
Thanks for this post.

350heather said...

I am a bit choosy in adding to my tree. I try to add links to cousins that would be of interest to our family if my grandparents were still living. That way the tree won't get out of hand for me! My grand parents loved to talk about their relatives so it is a huge tree. Way up in the thousands and I sure wish that it had been available 30 years ago when they were alive to show them. I find the leaf hints very helpful some times, but other times they are for some people that I know are not my relatives.

vfleslie said...

Are the 30-50 hints you process in 1-2 hours on Ancestry only? This does not include the time to download the records and enter into your genealogy program does it? If so I'm doing something wrong! :)