Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Adding Descendant Information the Easy Way - Post 3: Stimulating Hints in the Ancestry Member Tree

I wrote Finding Descendants of Rudolph Spangler (1738-1811) In the FamilySearch Family Tree on 23 August 2016, and followed that with Adding Descendant Information the Easy Way - Post 1: Importing it From FamilySearch Family Tree on 25 August 2016.  In the latter post, I laid out the steps I'm taking to add descendants of Rudolph Spangler to my RootsMagic database, starting from the FamilySearch Family Tree.  In Adding Descendant Information the Easy Way - Post 2: Importing it to an Ancestry Member Tree, I created a GEDCOM file in RootsMagic and imported it to a new Ancestry Member Tree.  Immediately after I imported the tree, I had 277 Hints, including 178 Records.

The next Step in this process is to let Ancestry.com find Hints for the persons in the tree.  Ancestry does this every day, adding a number of Hints by searching for several persons in the tree, seemingly at random.  However, if I add a person, or edit a person, the Hints for that person are searched again almost immediately.  

I have found that I can "stimulate" Hints in the Ancestry Member Tree by clicking on the black down arrows that indicate there is one or more generations that are descendants of the person with the black down arrow.  I spent an hour or so "stimulating" new Ancestry Hints in this tree.  

After doing that last week, I now had 3,778 Record Hints today:



Some of these Hints were generated by Ancestry's "normal" Hint search which occurs every day, and generates 10 to 30 Hints in this specific tree.

However, if I click on the black down arrow below a person profile (see the black down arrows below for William J. Nes (1857-1902) on the lowest line of descendants on the screen below), which indicates that there are descendants for the person, more generations of descendants already in the tree will appear:


William J. Nes is the person with a white name and a black background in the middle of the screen below:  


After clicking on the black down arrow, two more generations of descendants of William J. Nes and one generation of his sibling were added to the screen.  All of these persons were in the database already, but Hints had not been generated for them.  As you can see, there are now Hints for most of those persons (the green leaves).

I took the two screen shots above within one minute of each other and about two minutes after I took the first screen shot with the Hints count before I stimulated Hints.

How do I know that I stimulated Hints for those persons?  Here is the Hint summary page immediately after I took the last screen shot above:


The "Records" Hint count is now 3,837, an increase of 59.  In like four minutes.  The most recent Hints on the Hint list shown are for the 11 people that were "stimulated" by clicking the one black down arrow.  Note that "stimulating" by clicking one black down arrow caused Hints for the sibling of William J. Nes to be created too.

So Step 4 in my process outlined in the first post in this series is well underway, and I can move on to the biggest task in Step 5.

 Now I have enough (more than enough!!) Hints to work with.  I will go person-by-person through the tree adding content and sources to my RootsMagic database from those Hints.  


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Copyright (c) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

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1 comment:

Jay said...

Hi Randy - I've been looking for a follow up telling us your progress on this effort. How is it going, and what is your work flow from the Ancestry hints to adding new information to your RootsMagic database? I am looking at various ways of doing this for all of the new information I have turned up with the shaky leaves.