A new and easier way to share your tree

With our release last week, we’ve made it easier to invite people to your tree. You can now import your contact list from Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, and AOL accounts to quickly select people you want to send an invitation to. You can still type in individual email addresses if you’d like, but by importing your contact list you can save a little time and effort trying to remember your cousin’s email address.

How to invite friends and family to see your tree

From your tree, click on the “Share your tree” link in the “Tree pages” menu next to your tree name.

From the share pop-up window, you’ll have several options for inviting people to your tree. From the left hand column, you can choose to type in email addresses one-by-one, invite Ancestry.com members if you know their username, or import your contact list from your email account.

Selecting people from your imported contact list

When you choose to import your contact list, you will be asked to connect to your email account. Once you log into your email account and give us permission to access your account, we will import your contact list so that you can choose who you want to invite to see your tree.

To protect your privacy, we never store your username or password. And we only save the contact information for people you have invited to your tree. Once you finish sending your invitations, your entire contact list is erased (unless you invite everyone on your list).

Once your contact list is imported, select the people you want to invite to your tree. We don’t send an invitation to your full contact list. We only send it to the people you’ve selected from your list.

Setting roles before you send your invitation

You can choose roles to control what you will allow your friends and family to work on in your tree. Each person with whom you want to share your tree will have a drop down menu next to their name.

• Choose “Editor” if you want to give your cousin full access to add and edit people in your tree.
• Choose “Contributor” if you want your cousin to add photos but not change any facts in your tree.
• Choose “Guest” if you don’t want your cousin to have any rights except to see your tree.

When you’re finished, click the orange button to share your tree and we will send your friends and family an email invitation.
Managing your invitations

To go back to the list of people you’ve invited to your tree, you can visit the sharing tab in your tree setting page. You can find this link under the “Tree pages” menu.

Sharing your tree is a great way to get your family involved and have them help you fill it in!

Here’s where the Ancestry.com community can help you. Ever notice the Member Connect panel when you’re looking at a record image? We show you other members who have saved the record you’re viewing to their tree so that you can check out their research and contact them.

Last night we released an enhancement to the Member Connect panel. If members have saved the record you’re viewing to someone in their tree, we’ll now show you other records they have saved to the same person in their tree. We show you both the name of the record and how many people have saved it to their tree. Look through the list of records saved by the other members and you may discover an elusive record you could never find– or never thought to look for.

Don’t see other records?

If no one else has saved the record you’re viewing or no one else has saved other records for this person to their tree, then this new section won’t appear in the Member Connect panel.

If you don’t see the Member Connect panel on the page, it’s likely because you have it collapsed. You can open the panel by clicking on the arrow button on the right side of the screen.

Have you ever lost track of a record you printed or downloaded that you want to go back to?

You now have quick access to retrieve records you are storing offline.  Each time you print or download a record from Ancestry.com, it will appear in your Shoebox in a new tab for “Downloaded and printed records”. This way any discovery you make will be easy to find again.

Click here to check out your Shoebox.

With this addition, if you print or download a record we’ll also let you know about activity from other members on this record.  For example, you might find out about a correction a member makes to the record, or that a member has saved the record to a family tree on Ancestry.com that you haven’t seen before.  You’ll see these updates in the Recent Member Connect Activity box on your homepage and under the Collaborate tab.

With the updated Member Directory, now you can. From the Collaborate tab, select Member Directory. Then choose exactly the criteria you’re looking for, whether it falls under Research Interests, Basic Information, and Experience – or all of the above.

You can also now search for members by their username in the Basic Information tab.

The RSS feed is available from the Recent Member Connect Activity page. You can subscribe to the RSS feed in 3 easy steps:

1. Click on the “See more activity” link in the Recent Member Connect Activity on your homepage or click on “Recent Member Connect Activity” in the sub menu under the Collaborate main navigation (these links take you to the same page).
   
   
   
2. At the bottom of the right column on the Recent Member Connect Activity page, you’ll find a link to subscribe to the RSS feed.
   
   
   
3. When you click on the link, you will navigate to the RSS feed (XML) page. There are two ways to subscribe to the RSS feed. If your browser supports this, you can click on the “subscribe” link/button at the top of the page to add the RSS feed to your RSS reader. Otherwise, you can manually subscribe to the RSS feed by copying and pasting the URL from your web browser address bar into your RSS reader.

These links replace the ones that used to be on the Collaborate pages just below the right side of the main navigation bar. If you prefer, you can continue to edit your account settings from the “My Account Information” section of the “My Account” main page.

Message Board Favorites Listed In the Message Boards
The message board favorites list has also moved. You used to have to click on Collaborate > Message Boards > My Favorites. Now you can easily get to the topics you care about from the main Message Boards page. Click on Message Boards under the Collaborate main navigation from any page on the site and your message board favorites are directly listed there. If you have a lot of message board favorites, you can click on the “See all favorites” button to get to your full list.

If you’ve never used the Message Boards, it’s a great place to post questions for other members to help you in your research. To keep track of message boards you want to follow, look for the star icon on the category and board pages to save topics to your message board favorites list.