Thursday, January 28, 2016

Ancestry.com Revises "People With Hints" Presentation

Ancestry.com has been revising the look and feel of their web pages over the past 12 months, and changes have come to the "People With Hints"(from the home page) or "View All Hints" (from the Family Tree page).

1)  Here is the link for "View All Hints Page" on the Family Tree page (click on the dropdown arrow beside the tree name in the upper left-hand corner):


I clicked on the "View All Hints Page" link on the dropdown list, and saw the redesigned "All Hints" page:


There are five sets of data in the left-hand column:

*  All Hints
*  Records
*  Photos
*  Stories
*  Member Trees

There are two buttons at the top of the wide right-hand column on the screen above:

*  "Sort by Most Recent" (the default, there are other options)
*  "Filter by Name"

I clicked on the "Sort by Most Recent" dropdown arrow, and saw the other two options:

*  Last Name
* First Name


I chose "Sort by Last Name" and saw the top of the list:


Since I don't have a surname for some of my tree people, those with a blank in the last name field are at the top of the list.

On the screen above, I clicked on the "Filter by Name" and entered a last name of "seaver" into the "Filter by name" field, and saw:


I received almost 5,000 entries for Hints for "Seaver" persons in "Records."  I have lots of work to do!

2)  What's new here?  Here is a screen of the Hints from December 2015:


So the "look and feel" changes appear to be:

*  The big banner "All Hints" (white on a gray background) on the new screen.
*  The "Number of People with Hints" is not on the new screen
*  The buttons for "People" and "Hints" with numbers are not on the new screen
*  The "Filter by Name" alphabetical letters are not on the new screen.

As noted before, I am not a big fan of the gray background - but from a functional standpoint, that is not important.

3)  My hope was that another button would be added at the top of the right-hand side to "Sort by Database," which is my preferred method of dealing with Hints.  But it wasn't.  There is space for it, however!  Oh well.

As Genea-Musings readers may recall, I have been doing "Sort by Database" with my Hints for over three years - see Tuesday's Tip - Search Ancestry.com Hints by Record Collection (posted 27 January 2015).

In light of the changes to the "People With Hints" page on Ancestry.com, I wanted to make sure that the "Sort by Database" still worked.  It did - here is the page for the 1920 U.S. Census:


Note that it does not have the new "All Hints" banner and still shows a link for "All people with Hints" (which is from all of the Hints, not just this database).

4)  So - please, Ancestry.com, make me and other researchers happy, and add a "Sort by Database" option to your "All Hints" page.  It is really useful.  If you do that, then you should also add a link on the search page for each database that says "Search for Persons in your Member Tree in this Database."

As always, these Hints are not the result of a total Search of all of the Ancestry.com databases.  Ancestry adds Hints on a daily basis for certain persons in my Ancestry Member Tree.  I don't know how they select the persons, but they seem to do 3 to 7 persons each day.  In the 17 months since I added the tree in the screens above, they have found Hints for  8,267 persons.  That is up from 8,120 on 1 January 2016, so it's about 5 persons per day on average.


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Copyright (c) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

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4 comments:

Bonnie said...

It wasn't obvious the link you used to get the collection filter. I found this one at GenealogyBugged.blogspot.com

http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/yourtreenumber/hints?hf=record&hdbid=databaseID

where you add your tree number and the database (collection) ID to create the filter.


Unknown said...

I too noticed that the hints page had changed, not for the better as far as I'm concerned. I keep on top of my hints in all 5 of my trees, tackling them by the number of hints per person - lowest number first. This option is no longer available now. And another thing: did you know that when you delete a person's record it doesn't delete any media (photos) or other attachments? I didn't. I have just found many items that are not attached to anyone in my tree ... but you can't find this easily in the online tree. I'm having to laboriously check each record in Family Tree Maker in preparation to moving it to Reunion.

Steve K said...

Randy, related to this method of searching for hints one database at a time I have an AMTUODATE question. I have been using FTM (FTMM3) and thus sync keeps the trees... Well, in sync.

As I make my move to Roots Magic, I wonder about your process to update your AMT, to stimulate hints.

Thanks, Steve

Barb said...

Ancestry hints are the bomb and are very accurate for robot searching. This is my favorite way to work with hints, especially in new collections. There is something satisfying about working through a particular database.

I'm adding my voice to the your wish to have a filter to "Sort by Database" and would also add what you had said in another post; an easy button in collections to "Search your Ancestry Member Tree for persons with entries in this database." These 2 feature requests would be awesome!!!!