tips for using ancestry.com

New to Ancestry.com? Or don’t have much info on your tree there and want more, but you’re confused and overwhelmed on how to proceed?

Below are things I wish I had known when I first started using it. Knowing this would have made my search go much more smoothly, without haven’t to go back and correct things that completely and utterly messed up my trees a few times. I would have gotten information more quickly about my ancestors and I would have been less confused by some of the things from the DNA tests.

And here’s something I knew well before I began, and it’s why no revelations have been earth-shattering to me: I believe that your family is that which raised ya and claims ya. I believe that the people you claim as your family is YOUR choice. The love you feel for the people you call family in your life is REAL, and no DNA test will ever change that. Whomever you love and call your parents, your grandparents, your siblings, your aunts and uncles, your cousins – that love is real. and DNA doesn’t change it. DNA is not your full identity.

Interviews:

Interview your parents, every aunt and uncle – your parent’s siblings – and your grandparents, and your great-aunts and great uncles – your grandparent’s siblings. And your great-grandparents if they are still around.

• Ask each person for their full name. Don’t rely on one person giving you that name – many of your family members don’t know the actual, full name of even their closest relatives, even though they think they do. 
• Ask each person for their birth date.
• Ask each person for the birth date and place and, if known, the death date and place, of every ancestor and the siblings of those ancestors. 

Take the information you have, as much as you could gather, and THEN start your tree or trees on the platform. Some people do one tree for their maternal line and one for the paternal line. I wish I had. Having one big tree gets really confusing.

Do not just input direct ancestors; put in siblings of ancestors – aunts and uncles, great-aunts and uncles, etc. That’s going to be important later, trust me.

I also put in cousins’ names – again, it helps tremendously later with getting accurate information about ancestors. You will often discover, as months pass, that distant cousins you’ve never met have traced your family back several generations. But you also have to be careful – many have inaccurate info in their trees.

Census Data.

Once you have put in all the information about relatives that you have gathered from family, start confirming the information with Census data. The most recent Census data available is from the 1950s (the 1960s will be released in 2032). Find each family member that was alive in 1949 in the 1950s Census and link that information to family members.

Then look through 1940s and do the same. Then the 1930s. Read the information carefully and make CERTAIN it really is your relative that is listed in Census data you find (you do this by looking at who they are married to, according to the Census, their parents, their children, etc.).

Remember that Census data from this period was recorded orally; unfamiliar accents and pronunciations caused misspellings. Also, people did not always cooperate with Census takers. Residents were not always at home at the time a Census taker came and were therefore not counted, or neighbors sometimes gave erroneous information to the Census taker about an absent family. Black families in particular got left out of the Census. 

The 1870 Census is the first after the Civil War and was the first to list all African Americans by name. It is often the first official record of a surname for former slaves. The date and place of birth listed for former slaves and their families in this Census may be a gateway for searching (by state, county, and enumeration district) the slave or free schedules in 1850 and 1860, which do NOT name slaves but lists their numbers.

Hints:

Do not accept every green leaf – every hint – without carefully reading it over. No matter how unique you think a name is, don’t assume, “Hey, that’s part of my tree!” For instance, you are going to find out that there are families from the same county in 1860 that have almost all the same names, yet, they are NOT the same family!

Don’t count on any name, birth date (even just the year) or marriage date being accurate just because a family member gave you the information. You want every date verified with a census report, a marriage certificate, a draft card, a birth certificate or other official document. That’s not always possible, of course, but it will help you when you need to defend this info (and you will need to defend it if you let other family read it over).

Search:

Once you have filled out your tree back just three generations – through your great-grandparents, and you have accepted a few hints for them (after CAREFULLY reviewing them), do searches on each of those family members. For instance, go to one of your grandparent’s page and click on “Search on Ancestry” (under the “Sources” column). You will need to adjust some search fields to get accurate results. Look through those results carefully. If you find census reports, draft cards and other people’s family trees that you think might be a match to your ancestor, click on them, read them CAREFULLY, and if the names, places and dates line up, absolutely link it to your ancestor.

When you are done with your grandparents, then try your great-grandparents. After that, you are going to get a wave of new hints. Be oh-so-careful before you accept any of them as you fill in your tree more, especially ancestor names before 1850 – you might want to hold off on those for a full year, to make sure your other information is solid. 

When you have checked every hint for your ancestors through your great grandparents, you are ready to start carefully filling in the info for their parents, and so on. But go SLOWLY and carefully – don’t just start clicking “possible father” and “possible mother” for everyone!

Correct info:

As you progress over weeks and months, you are going to look under, say, a great-great grandparent’s page and see their list of kids and realize there are a LOT of duplicate records – three girls all named Daisy Brown are obviously all the same person. Merge records that are obvious duplicates – how to do that is in the upper right-hand corner of a record’s screen, under “tools.”

Fill out the stories:

Add a narrative to the LifeStory feature. Ancestry automatically generates one, but you can edit it, adding in information that family has given you, like where someone worked, where they served in the military, why they named a child whatever they did, or what job is listed on the census.

DNA Test:

Don’t do the DNA test until you have filled out your family tree back at least through your grandparents – more is better. I think getting information for ancestors born back to 1900 is a great goal before you do the DNA test. The DNA test isn’t going to tell you much unless you can see common ancestors with DNA matches, so you need your tree to go back at least three generations, in my opinion.

When you get your DNA test, go to the Ancestry web site and click on “DNA matches.” Then click on “common ancestors.” The resulting list are all the people that also took the DNA test and are both genetically linked to you and who have traced their family tree back far enough to show common ancestors.

I suggest at this point you create some color-coded groups and put your DNA matches with common ancestors in those groups. Ideally, the groups would be these (you can use family names rather than these titles):

• Maternal Grandmother’s Father
• Maternal Grandmother’s Mother
• Maternal Grandfather’s Father
• Maternal Grandfather’s Mother
• Paternal Grandfather’s Father
• Paternal Grandfather’s Mother
• Paternal Grandmother’s Father
• Paternal Grandmother’s Mother

Then put every DNA match that has a common ancestor into the right group. And don’t be surprised if some folks go in more than one group! This will take many hours, at least, but it is SO worth it – it’s going to make your searches so, so much easier and it’s going to make confirming hints so much easier. It took me more than a month to get every DNA match with a common ancestor into the right group.

You will need to generate this common ancestry list every other month and update your groups, because it changes as more people take the DNA test and more people fill out their family trees. I do it a few times a year.

Then, when you have all your DNA matches that have a common ancestry in groups, go back to the DNA matches pages so you can see everyone that’s a DNA match. Scroll down to the first person that shows up in the list that you don’t have a common ancestor with – and, therefore, you don’t have them in a group yet. Click on that person. Then click on “shared DNA matches.” You will see all the people that share DNA with both you and the person you have clicked on. Because you have put so many people in groups, and the groups are color-coded, you should be able to tell very quickly how the person is kin to you – Maternal Grandmother’s Father’s family, for instance – even though you haven’t yet identified a common ancestor. This is absolutely my FAVORITE part of the Ancestry.com experience. Once I do this, if the person has an unlinked public tree, I look at it and, often, I can figure out how we are related (they’ve usually got the common ancestor misspelled).

But it’s also going to be the case that you are going to click on someone and none of your shared matches are color-coded. And if that person is a close match – 80 cM or more – you are going to be particularly confused and intrigued, because they aren’t a distant relative. In those cases, first, click on their unlinked family tree, if they have such available, and look to see if one of your relatives is there but under a differently-spelled name. If there is nothing that looks familiar, put them in a category of their own – I call it “intrigue.” If that group starts to get larger and larger over time and a common ancestor does not emerge then, indeed, you have some family intrigue – and I’ll deal with that in the next section. 

Intrigue and Differences in Family Lore:

Your family doesn’t always have the right information about your family recorded. When you discover that the family has gotten a name wrong, or a marriage date wrong, or the number of children wrong, don’t be shocked that you get pushback from family members about the correction – no one likes to be wrong, even about something as simple as the spelling of a name.

You may find out something a bit more serious, that your family might not want to know about. You might find that someone listed as the sister of an ancestor was, in fact, the mother of that ancestor, and the people that you have listed as that ancestor’s parents are, in fact, that person’s grandparents. I found that in looking at Census records for a great, great grandparent.

You may find bigamy – an ancestor wasn’t actually widowed but, in fact, her husband ran off, left her, and started a new family elsewhere.