Links to Select Persons in Ancestry Trees (119.html)

Introduction

Note 1 You must be a paid-up member of Ancestry.com to view the following persons.
Note 2 Link to Back-Up screenshot is in [BU].
Note 3 Links to individuals at FamilySearch are in [ ].
Note 4 Any links clicked will open in this window.
Note 5 Persons with capitalized given names are "direct" ancestors.
Note 6 "~Desc" means "Ancestry tree shows no descendants".
Note 7 "[BU]" when underlined will link to a copy (screen-shot) of the "foreign" web page.

People Related to Me

Unrelated People

Historical People

Notes About Ancestry.com

Ancestry-Specific Notes

Ancestry's sources are mostly incontroversial and are easily copied into one's family tree at Ancestry when a relative (a person's information) is copied from one tree to yours. Ancestry also provides (chargeable) DNA analysis services, which very few major genealogy sites provide. Valuable census information, voters' lists and Drouin (French-Canadian) files are available, along with much other information housed at Ancestry. [This is being written by a new user of Ancestry, from a Canadian (French & English), American and United Kingdom point of view. Please notify the webmaster of this page, of any errors of fact, differing opinions need not be communicated. It should also be noted that the author has an extensive programming background, an Engineering degree and a post-graduate degree in Computer Science.] A user of Ancestry can separate his/her information into separate family trees, intentionally separating "islands" of people in each tree. These islands usually require some duplicate persons. Sources can be added but with limitations; for example a book reference is not readily supported. Fortunatey web-links are supported by Ancestry. A GEDCOM containing your tree information can also be produced by Ancestry.

Ancestry houses the WorldConnect family trees and has promised to continue supporting WorldConnect (Source 3). Unfortunately, the page titles no longer appear within WorldConnect. More importantly, the "Post-Em" notes within WorldConnect no longer appear. Also, much or all of the "RootsConnect" information (Source 3), such as family photo galleries is not easily accessible on the web. See a work-around web link to "Tree Leaves By Cole (Good)" above. Another example of this problem is the obituary notice for John Lentis Stoik (Source 8). The official Ancestry source record links to a non-existant record at Rootsweb obits. Furthermore, his BGMI (Source 4) obituary (also an Ancestry link) is too abbreviated to provide any useful information.

Some genealogists rely solely on Ancestry and therefore their family trees exist solely within Ancestry and no-where else. FamilySearch provides an option to search Ancestry, but no equivalent option exists in Ancestry back to FamilySearch. Unfortunately there is no world-tree within Ancestry. Ancestry does not allow for a Life Sketch (Source 2). Notes written by the genealogist cannot be publicly viewed.

Ancestry's presentation of information is very unique and rewarding. Three columns of information exist: Facts are listed in "Fact" boxes on the left in chronological order (including facts about siblings of parents). Sources are in the middle. Family tree persons are listed on the right. When one clicks on a "Fact", the links to its "Sources" become visible. Genealogist-written (ie user-written) comments are permitted within each "Fact" box, but users rarely make use of this (probably because such comments are not "automatically" copied with the person). These comments can be used to link to photos and documents in the Ancestry Gallery but the handling of photos and documents by FamilySearch seems to be superior. An automatically-generated LifeStory is provided by Ancestry, but unfortunately, the comments and Gallery items are excluded from the LifeStory. The third (rightmost) "Family" column is limited to parents, spouse(s) and children, but siblings can optionally be listed.

A very powerful "Save to [My] Tree" mechanism is included by Ancestry. The copying of sources is automatic but is entirely under user control. Individual sources and/or facts can be included/excluded at will. This permits the genealogist to exclude "erroneous" information and copied facts can be marked as "Preferred" or "Alternate". Partial information can even be manually copied by the user at this time. But new [to Ancestry] fact types cannot be added.

Information in user files created by Family Tree Maker software (by Software MacKiev, Source 7) is linked (synchronized) to Ancestry. But the relationship between Ancestry and Software MacKiev [in 2018] gives signs that it might be in turmoil:

On Feb 3 2016, Lesley K. Cafarelli said:
Ancestry really missed the boat by announcing that FTM would no longer be supported or produced weeks before announcing that it will be continued and how [. . . . in] the meantime, many of us have been looking at alternatives and even switched over to something else. Bad management and marketing, Ancestry.

Should a genealogist invest time and money in such software? Many years ago, the author (David Cole) migrated from Family Tree Maker software to PAF software and he now uses Legacy software. Legacy software has links to two "world trees"; it provides user-maintained links to FindAGrave.com and it provides synchronized links to FamilySearch.org . Ancestry includes FindAGrave as a source, but does not provide a link to the person's ID at FindAGrave, other than the necessary ID in the weblink. Perhaps Ancestry will eventually form an alliance with a different software provider. Or perhaps Ancestry might sync to the world tree at WikiTree in the future. Where are the old WorldConnect trees (which are visible on the web) now hiding within Ancestry? They must be somewhere on the Ancestry computers. We can still search and link to these trees? Perhaps Ancestry should look at the myriad presentations of information that are possible (although somewhat hidden) at WikiTree. Extensions to Ancestry such as these might convince the author and other serious genealogists to purchase a future "Really Advanced" or "Extended" membership at Ancestry. The user genealogy web pages at rootsweb are now available online again.

Perhaps a new Ancestry "hint" (maybe a future "dupe" hint in the top-left corner) might link to all possible duplicate persons within Ancestry. Such potential duplicates are an important feature of FamilySearch. A moderately simple change to Ancestry would be the optional inclusion of FamilySearch ids for each person listed in Ancestry, possibly also in the previously suggested top-left corner hint. Ancestry could invent a new AIN (Ancestry ID Number) for one best-fit person in each list (of say-more than 3 possible duplicate people). Users of Ancestry could be given 1 year to adopt a AIN for each of the people in their tree, after which time Ancestry would assign a unique AIN to all people across all trees. Some of these AIN keys could then be linked to the FamilySearch ID (FS ID), to the WikiTree ID (WID) and to the FindAGrave ID. This could be the first step towards an Ancestry World Tree. If this is done, Ancestry should not make the error of including part of the surname in the AIN. This created terrible problems in WikiTree for surnames with multiple spellings. Also, confusing letters and numbers (0/O/Q, 8/B, 5/S, 1/I/7, 2/Z ) should not be used. This created problems in FamilySearch for aging people and/or those with poor eysight. May I suggest that the following letters be omitted: B, I, O, Q, S, Z and keeping the full set of 10 digits and the other 20 capital letters. Perhaps all AIN codes should begin with the character "@" followed by 10 other letter/digit combinations including a single checksum digit. For example "@14X7P-39HM3". Note that 30 to the 9th power is 2 x 10^13 which is sufficiently high.

FamilySearch is providing better and better genealogical apps for the iPad and iPhone. Ancestry has also begun to do something similar.

The author (David Cole) has been disappointed by the absence of optional links (in Ancestry) to persons at FamilySearch and by the "loss" of non-Ancestry-sourced obituaries when copying a person's information. Of course, a person can appear in many different Ancestry Family Trees. But these "possible duplicates" cannot easily be seen or noted. For these reasons, the author keeps a separate file (this article) to house this important correlating information for the small number of individuals that are currently important to him. As seen above, this article divides people into 3 categories:
People Related To Me, Unrelated People and Historical People.
The individual family tree name and author within Ancestry are also listed above. There is a need for an AIN. Of course, for these Ancestry links to be successfully used, one must be a paid-up member of Ancestry.

The author recently said:

"A small pop-up cross-computer notepad (such as a mini-'Google Keep') would be a boon, to allow me to keep a list of current IDs. I need full-time access to the FS ID, my GEDCOM User-ID (an anachronistic mis-nomer), WikiTree ID, FindAGrave ID and a non-existant Ancestry ID to each group of 'person duplicates'. Chrome/Chromium seems to offer the best solution to this problem across computer platforms (Windows, MacBook and Linux-Ubuntu). If only a better solution existed !!! Could a special keyboard driver provide some Ancestry-defined control (or alt) keys to remember these cross-system ID codes for us?" See Source 12 Problem 18 for a solution to this.

In the absence of a good solution, the author now constantly works with the following different types of windows open on his computers:

1. Ancestry (showing a Family Tree and an individual's profile)
2. Legacy linked to FamilySearch (allowing maintenance of my main GEDCOM database)
3. FamilySearch (showing the current individual)
4. An editor, currently Edit-Pad Lite (maintaining this article to correlate Ancestry,
             FamilySearch and Legacy info and various person-IDs.)
5. FindAGrave, or another obituary site (to locate and correlate obituaries and tombstones.)
6. A list of "My Sources (Source 9)".
7. FileZilla (or any FTP - File Transfer Program) to update my webpages.
8. WikiTree (Source 6, occasionally used to view the current person).

If only there were a way to do all of this at the same time, using less windows. The author believes that this is possible. Perhaps Ancestry might find a way to make this happen.

Web Sources

Daisy Sullivan at Ancestry.com

Daisy Sullivan at Ancestry.com (see her autobiography)

Ancestry rootsweb "404 Error" from by Obituary Daily Times Index

WikiTree

My Sources

Gen: Cole's Memorials (72)

My searchable iGalri Photo Gallery

Software Problems and Solutions

WebMaster: Ye Old King Cole