Monday, August 29, 2016

Good News: Ancestry Member Trees Indexes Were Updated

I wrote Ancestry Member Trees Indexing Update - UPDATED on 11 August 2016, noting that the Ancestry Member Trees index had not been updated since February 2016, according to sources.  I wrote an email to my Ancestry contact, who indicated that they were planning on updating the AMT Index.

In a later email, Matt indicated that the indexing of the Ancestry Member Trees used a different system than the Hinting system, and that Hints were updated within 24 hours of new or edited profiles, but that AMT Indexing was updated periodically.

1)  I wondered how long the Indexing update would take, and the information we received was early September.

In order to determine when the AMT Indexing occurred, I added four new profiles to my Ancestry Member Tree, as discussed in Ancestry Member Trees Indexing Update - UPDATED.  I added a source citation for three of the persons - Solfest Johannesen, the father of Britha, and Ragnhild Solfestdtr.  I did not add a source citation for Eli Solfestdtr in order to test the earlier statement by Ancestry that the Ancestry Member Trees are only indexed if they have at least one source for the profile.

I checked every few days after my blog post, and documented the efforts in updates to the blog post.

When I checked on Saturday, 27 August, the three profiles in my Ancestry Member Tree were found in a search.  Here are two screens that show the three search results:




Here is Solfest Johannesen's profile in my Ancestry Member Tree:


note that there is a source for his birth.  Note also that there are three children listed - Eli, Britha and Ragnhild.

Here is the profile for Eli Solfestdtr, who does not appear in the search results:


Eli Solfestdtr does not appear in the search results because there is no source citation for events in her profile.  

2)  Now the question becomes:  When will the next AMT Indexing occur?  Will it be daily, weekly, monthly, yearly?  I don't know, but I've asked Ancestry the question in an email.  

I have created another test to determine when the next AMT Indexing occurs.  I added spouses for all three of the daughters this morning.  Here is the profile for the spouse of Britha Solfestdtr:



I added a source for his birth and death events.  I did the same for spouses of Eli and Ragnhild Solfestdtr also.

3)  Does any reader want to guess how long it will take for Ancestry to add these three spouses to the AMT Index?  


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4 comments:

Linda Stufflebean said...

Based on the time period since the last update, I'll say 1 February 2017, just before RootsTech starts.

Geolover said...

Far cry from a few years ago, when they said they were going to be indexing trees weekly.

Unknown said...

Another thing that has been updated for me in the past 24 hours are the England & Wales Birth, Marriage and Death Indexes. They have now been renamed to include "Civil Registration" in the name. So for example, the "England & Wales, Birth Index, 1916-2005" database is now "England & Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1916-2005".

I was wondering what your opinion on online databases being renamed is, on the topic of crafting source citations. If you haven't just been adding the citations through Ancestry and instead been crafting your own manually, then you would need to update your sources.

Depending on how you do it, this could be a simple matter, or a painstaking process to update thousands of free-form citations.

Or would you not need to update them? Perhaps the correct practice is to cite based on how it was when you accessed the record?

Then there's the debate on whether you should cite indexes at all.

Marian said...

Randy, thanks so much for pursuing this. Setting up the test and checking the results every day must be on the tedious side,and I appreciate your work on behalf of the community.

I'm afraid that re-indexing will occur a few months after you rattle their cage again.