I actually found this in the middle of the night last night and made a comment about it on the last post. I LOOOVVVEEE this new feature, once I figured out how to work it. It makes importing people so much easier and lets me actually choose what I do and don’t want to import. Thanks so much!

What on earth is going on with hints??? It has reduced an enjoyable quick question to a labor intensive and tedious chore. I like the fact that it includes additional info, BUT, there is no simple accept or ignore. I accepted a green leaf hint on one of my ancestors (it said I had 8 sources). It took FOREVER to download the hints. The first time I accepted it’s hints, only to discover it does NOT merge… it DUPLICATED every single item. This caused me to go back in and painstakingly delete that duplicated input. Once I got that corrected I went to the next ancestor. 8 sources AGAIN!!! having already burned my fingers, I was hesitant to reach back in to the fire!! But accept hint I did, and in I went. It took almost 6 minutes just to open the hints!!! So, this time I figured out the handy little center arrow button..WRONG. It took an average of 43 seconds EACH time I wanted to accept or not include in tree. This is a large family, abt a dozen children. Do the math…I labored over that 8 source, 15 people multiple displayed list (over 7 pages) well in excess of 3 HOURS. Imagine my horror, and DISGUST when the system froze up when I accepted at the end, and it shut down (dumping all that work).
Regardless of the new items it OFFERS (but won’t give) I’m not impressed with your new system.

How about a really cool feature that makes it possible to delete individuals? I can’t find any way to do that, and there doesn’t seem to be a readily available HELP tab that might give me an answer. HELP!!

Apparently I don’t subscribe to something that would have WARNED me about this new feature. I signed in to do a search on an individual and to my surprise up popped all these hints. I had no idea what to do or what it was. So, using my normal hit or miss technique I managed to add 18 individuals to my tree. However, most of those individuals were ALREADY in my tree and thus DUPLICATED/NOT MERGED names all over the place. I spent 2 hours last night comparing and deleting duplicates. There must be another way to keep from getting all those duplicate names??!!. . . One was in there 3 times with exact information.
I’m not certain I like this new feature.
I think there needs to be an accept/ignore button on each hint.

I discovered this new procedure yesterday and have gained some new info. However, on one of the trees which I am compiling I am being offered photos from a distant cousins tree which we originally supplied to her and I cannot make the’ignore’ facility delete them no matter how hard I try. When I return to the pedigree tree the flashing leaf is still there with the offer of photos which I already have! Any suggestions?

This new system STINKS. Either fix it or i’n outta here.

This new system STINKS. Either fix it or i’m outta here.

I don’t know who Idaram is but I don’t think his/her rude behavior is proper for this board. You can voice your opinions about a new feature without the language. Please block this individual from comments, there are children that may work on Ancestry.

This feature was made for lazy, inexperienced people who don’t want to do work.

This feature allows the inexperienced to merge records into their tree that may contain incorrect information and the inexperienced person won’t even know the difference because they are lazy and inexperienced.

This merge feature REMOVES THE ENJOYMENT OUT OF DOING THE RESEARCH YOURSELF, and contributes to sloth.

Ancestry.com is encouraging, aiding and abetting sloppy research work.

Shame on you Ancestry.

I transfered my tree over to the new Ancestry tree and great amount of data are missing which goes back as far as the 16th century. I’ve spent at a minimum of three years compiling this tree. Is this one of the bugs you reference and will it be repaired before the OFT is deleted?

The new merge mechanisms in fTM 2008 are really horrible. In previous versions if I found a Census entry I could import a whole family, merging and adding as needed. Now it has to be done with several interaction per fact. I’m beginning to wish I had never upgraded. Good job I still have a version to roll back to.

What has happened to the printer friendly sign on the family tree

I think the new merge system works pretty well and provided more flexibility which is much appreciated. I see 2 problems though: 1) After merging, I no longer see a LINK or Source Link placed into the person that was merged. Hence there is no way to view the original tree that was merged with my people. 2) The merging process wipes out the DESCRIPTION info I have placed into various Events (such as Birth, Death).

I’m growing old VERY quickly waiting for this new system of hints to get it’s kinks worked out (that is assuming of course that they are actually working on making it work better). It takes excessively long periods of time to even load the hints page and then if you decide to attach a record you might as well go take the dog for a walk while it’s trying to load THAT page. Most often though the following page never loads and you have wasted at least 5 minutes. If anyone at ancestry.com is really reading these comments here’s a suggestion: Why not put the old system back? Or at least why don’t you give us the ability to choose which system to use? The old system was infinitely better and FASTER. I’d hate to think that this new system is what we will have to deal with as I’ve just wasted 35 minutes trying to get just one hint to get to the stage where I can even view the page! And even as I write my screen now says “We have encountered an error. Please click here or the back button in your browser and try again”. I’m ready to give up! Couldn’t someone have TESTED this new feature before putting it into production without warning? It’s pathetic.

Made aware of new HINTS today. On the surface, it appears to be a good idea; however, it is extremely time consuming. It is not as simple as it seems. To be able to import with sources is phenomenal but it needs to do it everytime which it does not. It doesn’t seem to MERGE but duplicate. Needs more work but is great idea if wrinkles can be ironed out.

Why has the printer freindly sign in family tree been removed? How do we print a 5 generation pedigree.

Have just viewed the beta version and found that my Grandmother is now my Grandfathers daughter-in law !!!

I am sorry to say that I agree with most people who have written about the new hints and merges feature. It needs a lot of work to be user friendly. I spent more time removing information after a merge than it would have taken to input each name one at a time. Very disapointing.

I LOVE this new feature however I agree with another person commenting on duplicates. It would be nice to look at your own tree and discover duplicates and merge them. I accidentally added a bunch of duplicates to my tree and have no way of knowing if they are there or not. I do know I have a lot but I don’t know how to begin to eliminate them. –Thanks so much. I know everyone is working hard to take our comments into account when improving this site. It is a huge undertaking. Thank you again!

Rebecca, of course you love the new hints merge feature.

You don’t have to do any research work on your own then. You are just TAKING the work of someone else.

That is why Ancestry.com has been accused of promoting poor genealogical research, because they are pushing the hint merge feature and they can’t guarantee those hints are correct and accurate.

Shame on you Ancestry and shame on all of you who copy other people’s work without documenting it or verifying the accuracy.

Reading the feedback carefully I see that Ancestry is forging ahead with innovation BEFORE they have addressed several long-standing problems. These have now come home to impact upon the new. The writer who commented on the inordinate length of time it took for hints to load is not wrong and issues like this will never change until Ancestry start listening to customers. I have spent a huge amount of time on the telephone and through email cooperating with specialist staff dealing with my complaints about the very poor running speeds of several functions. All are linked to loading something. Everyone knows the classic problem of loading the Enhanced Image Viewer. Go and bake a loaf of bread is the only remedy. Logging on today was painful: adding another viewer to my tree took an eternity: loading this page – yes I made some coffee! There simply is no point at all in any of this unless Ancestry comes into the 21st Century and sorts its servers and bandwidth problems out. I am convinced this is where the money (my money!) should be spent.. I left Genes Reunited for exactly this reason and have suffered Ancestry going down exactly the same road. And who said Flash technology was exciting??? I will here forecast mega-problems using that. It alone is slow and clunky (Genes uses it to their detriment) and it MUST be kept bang up to date otherwise it just turns into a bowl of porridge! I say all this on the basis of having very reliable high speed broadband. My heart goes out to those who still have to use a modem.

So far I’ve liked the new system. Most of my research has been done over the last 3 years. My problem in the last month has been “saving to my tree new information”. In the month of December I’ve found 2 new people for my tree, imputting all the information only to find a week later is was gone…..where would it go?????

I really like the new hints, at first it took a lot of time, but now I just skim down and see how different, from what I have, is the new stuff, and if I have an issue w/it I go to it, and if not, quickly go to the bottom and its all done. Really like that now I can get photos from my other trees to put in the one major one, and this is done quickly. Thanks!

I have also run into the same bugs and delays mentioned in previous postings. This type of major enhancement is sure to initially have problems. Key to the situation is a fast response. My experience has shown that Ancestry is responsive to my needs.

I like the new features. Yes, they can be improved and over time we will benefit from those improvements. Thank you Ancestry for the many ways that you improve my research! I could never have made the progress that I have so quickly without my membership. I don’t agree with those who are concerned about inaccuracies easily being carried forward and users not conducting their own research. Good gracious, if you’ve been researching for enough years you know that even “reliable” sources have errors. The bottom line is that a researcher always verifies their facts and sources. Certainly I love the thrill of finding someone after 20 years of searching. If the hints from someone else finally helps to get me there – hurray! I consider their tip to be another step on my path to completely researching that individual. Further, to learn that some consider their research to be exclusive is very disappointing. I can honestly rest better at night when I know that my research will be available to others years after I pass.

I’m sure that others will do a very adequate job of making suggestions for the features under discussion, so I would like to add a couple of additional requests:

1) set default so that an individual’s photos are sorted by the date field to be viewed in chronological order – either from the most recent to the earliest or the reverse. Currently it is set by most recently uploaded.

2) “view all photos” from the home page to be sortable or default to alpha order.

3) add optional “primary photo” check box to each “attached” person on edit page of individual photos so that a picture can be managed from one page.

4) ability to add a photo to someone in the OneWorldTree. Many historic figures do not have photos or may have a photo that is poor quality.

Thank you, Ancestry!

I happen to like the new feature. I always recheck the hints that it gives, but it has opened up links to other family members. It has also allowed me to connect with new family members that I would not have known about.

Before the new system it was enjoyable to watch my ancestor tree grow. Now with the new system,if you can work out the bugs it sounds great. But In the mean time, I would accept a greenleaf hint on several of my ancestors, the system is really slow in openning the hints. I still can’t open my greenleaf hints. I get tired of waiting. What should I do?

I like the new hint feature as far as being able to add the children without having to type them in, although I am concerned that this feature will also allow others that are not as concerned about the validity of the data will be accepting more invalid data than you were allowed to do before. I even found myself doubting some of the information unless I could find it on a census and wondering what kind of tree I might be building now!

Sorry, folks, your new hint acceptance feature has really turned adding people into a chore, because it takes so long to have the website respond back to a request to add, modify, or ignore new information. My hope is that you’ll do what’s necessary to speed up the response time of the feature, or simply revert back to the old feature.

Don’t like this change at all.

Things sure are slower and lock up a lot, I’ve had issues with ‘trojans’ when I tried to load the online tree and used live help thinking to let them know they had a problem. They told me it was probably with my computer, but amazingly an hour after my live session, the ‘trojan’ messages stopped and the tree loaded as before. The only thing I like about the new stuff is being able to see and omit things I do not want to add. I have had issues where I added what seemed to be good info to discover that a father was born AFTER his ’sons’ death! This caused me to have to massively delete all the additions. I AM getting hard data to back up all I add with the hints, but it helps to SEE and be able to Chose what I put in my tree. Please work on the speed issue…it is atrocious!

If you really want to help, you should give us access to all birth, death, marriage certificates to at least all people who have died. That would save us a lot of time and money.

I liked the world tree hint better. I clicked accept on the new tree hint feature and was horrified to find that 16 people were added to my tree. most were duplicates, luckily I was able to find and delete them. I’m not going to try that again, so now I just click ignore when a family tree “Hint” shows up. I’ve read the other comments and I agree that this is going to promote sloppy research. I have spent years compiling the information that I have and checking to make sure it is as accurate as I can. The only reason that I am putting it on Ancestry.com is as an insurance against any loss of the info I have at home. I am attaching all the records that I can and the hint feature is nice but doesn’t find them all because of the different ways the names are spelled and misspelled in the various index’s. So because I already know where the records are I can find and attach them myself.
I have one other request. I wish that we could see an outline of all the individuals in the tree, like we could on the old trees.
Thank you

I need to ask if you tried this new 2008 version out on your own and with a core trial group of people before selling it to everyone else. It has good and not so good features. I think it will be a good program once all the kinks are out of it.

I mostly like the new 2008, but do have some issues with it. How about adding a feature where I can save more than one page of the census. I am forever finding a family where the data is split over two census pages and I can only merge the page with the head of household, and I really want to save both pages to include all the household members. When I find someone in the census I always look at the page before and behind because many times I’ll find someone else that I need information on. We need a way to save that data easily. Right now I can save it to my hard drive and then move it to where I want it, but I shouldn’t have to.

The other thing I miss is not being able to search the Ancestory.com files without it being linked to a person in my tree. Sometimes I want to research allied lines, or neighbors as a way of gaining more information on people in my tree, we used to be able to do that. Now everything is linked to someone in the tree and it is aggravating.

I love the look and feel of the new Family Tree Maker 2008. The only thing I don’t like about it (and this keeps me from using it) is that when I click on a link, it opens the browser window in the program itself; I like to toggle back and forth and open multiple windows for compareson. Perhaps I just haven’t figured it out, but this is very important to me.

Thanks,
Carol Ann

I liked the hints that came up regarding parents, spouses, children. I simultaneously input in My Reunion 9 file along with putting it into Ancestry which I have got quite a few hits on Ancestry which has developed into getting copies of photos or more info regarding the families I am searchin. I have a Mac and Family Tree Maker decided to quit supporting Mac’s around 2.0. which I thought was rather rude but I like Reunion. Like everyone else though after a bit one evening finding out there was not a way to selectively add or not add a person thus getting families names added several times because I type real fast, I finally figured out looking over the info first against what I have or don’t have, if it is a possible putting into my file to check on. THEN I HIT IGNORE AND PUT WHAT I WANT TO ADD. I am not sure if my trees are in the new format or old. I think it may be the new as I do remember some changes happening a while back that trees I had worked on and had not backed up very well had disappeared and after sending an email someone assisted or a glitch was fixeded that my info came back much to my relief. THE MAIN COMPLAINT I HAVE LATELY IS GETTING THROWN OUT OF ANCESTRY SAYING TO TRY LATER, AND TODAY FOR SOME REASON AM NOT ABLE TO ACCESS VIEWING THE ACTUAL COPIES OF STUFF. DON’T KNOW IF GLITCH WITH YOUR PROGRAM OR A GLITCH FOR ME AS WE WENT FIBEROPTIC WIFI TODAY. THANKS TRUDY

I have been a member since Oct. 2007. In the beginning I began saving docs in my Shoe Box for further research or to connect to family members as I got further along with information that was relevant. Recently, I have been attempting to either utilize the docs I have saved or delete them. And, cleaning up my Shoe Box has not been simple nor pleasant.

My biggest complaint is when deleting a saved document from my Shoe Box say on page 10, rather than returning to page 10 after deletion, the program takes me back to page one (1) in the Shoe Box and I have to spend time trying to go back to where I was. This is done even if you open the document to view it prior to making a decsion as to what to do with the doc.

Why can you not program the Shoe Box to return to the page you were viewing from rather than every time returning you to the very first page of the Shoe Box. G-d forbid you should not make a note of the page you were viewing and deleting from.

It seems simple to me. How about you?

whenever I import something it is duplicated 3x and pictures are in the wrong files, I will have a female in where a male should be or vise versa and as for mergeing well that’s a whole other story…………

My comment on the new Hints page is that after I have accepted the hint I cannot access the persons files again.
This was a handy feature in the old system of hints, as when I have accepted the hint(s) I am usually in the middle of doing something else and like to go back later and look at their tree, down to the latest person, even though the person is entered as “Living”, It gives me an idea which arm of the family the person belongs to.
Can we please have this feature back????

All I can say is…..NOW I understand how you can justify raising the membership price to $39.99. The thing is, I ABSOLUTELY do NOT like these, so called improvements!!! It has made things more difficult instead of easier!!!!!

The new 2008 version has been a tremendous disappointment.
It didn’t “mesh” with my already
collected information and tree so
I spent hours trying to transfer my
tree into the new system. This lead to the complete melt-down of my computer, had to go through a pc recovery, lost everything!
I will not reinstall it… I went back to my trusted 2006 version.
Let me know when you get it together!

I am relatively new at this research but enjoy it tremendously. It is incredible to me to realize that the more detective work I do the more the questions multiply and my search only expands. I believe this is a great site and love the growin options we have as users. Though there are many little aspects that need to be worked out. The “hints” feature is great and I am now seeing a great improvement where before the only hints I would recieve before were those that came back at me from my own site and gathered information and not very useful. I think the idea of community sharing is spectacular. And when I have confidance enough of my own accuracy with my tree I shall go public with it.Unlike Dave’s comment from earlier about someone wanting to be lazy and benefit from others work I won’t have any problem with sharing what I have learned. Not everything in life has to be bought and sold. On the other hand I would hope if enough people feed information into the Ancestry.com system they might just be able to reduce their membership fees a bit. And in that spirit I would hope others would agree so that if I work hard trying to unravel the mystery of whom my ancestors were it would be nice to find little pieces of the puzzle others have found.

I totally agree with D. Thomas comment pf December 20 – Is there as “quick and simple” set of instructions that is assessable to those of us who do not have the time or inclination to read through a ton of unrelated comments to attempt to find an answer and then in disgust and frustration give up. I am attempting to convert every thing to Family tree Maker or get hard copys of all that I have put into Ancestry. But with a few thousand and 4 trees it isn’t easy. After all althought retired I do have a life other than sitting in front of a computer.

I initially signed up with Ancestry back in about 1999 or so (not totally sure but I signed up when the website was new). I was a student and money was tight so I had to let my subscription run out. Then in 2006 someone responded to one of my old posts YEPPIE!! (pays to use an e-mail address and keep it going). I went back in head first right as a bunch of new changes were happening. I loved all of those changes. I remembered how it was ‘back in the old days’ when the website initially came out. That’s not so much now. Speaking to the new ‘hints’….
I have indeed noticed a change. One change is that on a few of my people, I will click on the hint and the page will say ‘no new hints at this time’ or something to that affect – annoying. The second is the actual hints. I’m not so impressed with them. Generally they are WAAAYYYY off! I mean SO off! On the other hand, it does get me to go search for the records that will match so that is a good thing I suppose!
….And in a lot of the posts which I am reading for the very first time today since joining Ancestry, I would have to agree with the whole merging tree thing. I have made my tree private because I can’t stand the lazy BLLEEEEEEP people that can’t do the research themselves. I am all about meeting distant family and SHARING and exchanging information but my research, careful documentation and now, years spent is not up for some couch potato to just merge to their tree because the thing – eh, it looks good to me!

Like the other comments, I do not like the new system. There is too much duplication on a merge, and it is VERY time consuming to change the option to “do not add” for every person. AS with other members, most of the folks I’m interested in had a lot of kids. The computer tends to not recognize duplicates, and tells me “new person” for most of it.

I would also like to make it a lot easier to delete a name from my tree. I still haven’t figured out how to do that other thatn to delete the relationship. Of course, they then stay on my list.

Other thatn those 2 critiques, I love the site. thank you!

THIS MAY NOT BE THE CORRECT PLACE TO ASK THIS BUT I NEED HELP. I HAVE SCANNED ALL OF MY OLD PICTURES FOR MY SITE AND I HAVE DOWNLOADED THEM TO ANCESTORY AND WHEN I TRY TO PUT A PIC ON A CERTAIN PERSONS PAGE , I GET ALL THE PICTURES. I NEED HELP. THANKS JEANNIE

I started using Family Tree Maker in 1994 – the following year they sent out “invitations” to join a world family tree. I said I didn’t think so!! It’s too young – I’ll wait for them to get the kinks worked out. Looks like they still haven’t got it figured out! I’m sure glad I never submitted any of my information to the internet!

I wish I could turn off unhelpful hints. Having run through all my hint leaves several times, I keep returning to hints I know are wrong (other year, other husband, sometimes even other country) and would love to turn them off so I am not distracted into thinking they offer some new insight.

Not only happy with the hints. I am also getting hints I can quickly see to be wrong – but can’t tell FTM to ignore them. so they keep coming back.
In addition, I find hints to an old and less accurate tree of mine, posted many years ago to One Family…

#50 Judy,

Becuase you might want to copy data from your other tree to the one you are working on.

A wonderful feature.

all well and good these new singing and dancing features but i still cannot download a genuine gedcon file that will up load to genesreunited,no matter how much i try. i run both sites and had no problem importing from their gedcom.i have tried 4 times to export my tree and non of the files say thet are a “GEDCOM”
i NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE this is driving me crazy!
Regards
Lou

I personally love the new “hints”.(green leaf) Yes, you must be careful using them, but it allows one to compare and confirm information. The UNFORTUNATE part is I only compared and used information about the sibs related to me…when I went back to complete the family information. I found the hints had disappeared! Can we please bring
that option back???? Nowhere did it say these would disappear after using it one time. I have emailed the help line on how to get this information back. Noone replies.

ok
so where is the coment that i made on this topic gone to which lisa in message 50 left ananswer

looks as if i have been censored for giving an opinion

When is the family merge process going to be fixed? Are we getting a new merge feature? This one has been broke for a long time.

great improvement, please accept my congratulations

this is the greatest thing since…I’ve forgotten the saying…but it is great because sometimes they have more info and sometime you have more than them but atleast you can take what you want and leave the rest…

It’s really frustrating to get hints that have no information in them, and I am unable to ignore. Please address this issue, thank you.

I happened for the first time just now on this “blog” about “hints” in the “new” Ancestry member Tree (AMT) system.

After looking over most messages, there is a clear consensus that the “hints” feature in the new AMT system is highly defective: it’s slow and attaches junk to your file that is tedious to remove.

Contrast that with the “old” Online Family Tree (OFT) system. The hints feature in OFT allows one to search for related information. There is no automatic “merge” feature, but that is absolutely desirable when one wishes to view and evaluate each hint.

Readers should know that the “old” OFT system also makes your ancestry file available to the public–and not just to Ancestry.com subscribers.

I urge Ancestry.com to sustain the “old” OFT system for those who have found (and will find) it an effective tool for developing stand-alone genealogical ancestry files.

I don’t have any recommendation for improvement of the AMT system since it seems to be clearly so crippled in terms of utility and accessibility that I and many, relatively experienced developers of personal ancestry files would never use it.

Sincerely,

Gary Collins

A lot of my earlier ancestors is missing. I had over 1500 individuals in my other tree, and this one only has 217. Where is the rest of my family?????

hi
BATA TEST BEFORE PUTTING IT ON THE WEB OR DO YOU KNOW HOW TO BATA TEST
ASK ANY 12 year old he can tell you

When looking at thr list of people with hints (over 1000), is there any way to go to a specific letter? i.e. L.

Currently, I have to scroll down 100 at a time and then after processing that hint, it goes back to the beginning of the list.

But the hints pages won’t load on Friday 13 Feb 2009! so program not living up to its hype.