When you use Ancestry every day, you pick up a few tricks. Here are my most used tricks that I use to build client trees and to help them get the most bang for their buck. Hopefully these will help you extend your family tree and save some time for you on Ancestry. I've got seven tips for you. Here we go! Tip number one has to do with your searches. Now a lot of people really rely on their hints. They think if it doesn't show up in a hint it's not in there. Which is SO not true. So let me give you an illustration. This is my teaching tree. So here we have George E. Paston and I've attached a few things to him. There's a lot more that are been attached in my tree. And so here we see some hints that are for him in the hints program. Now there's quite a bit here, and that's great. But there's more! And let me show you. So we have 10 hints here. I'm going to do a search. I'm going to break here for a quick little announcement. Do you need help with your genealogy research? 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If I click the search right up here on the top right I'm going to perform a new search for George some of the things that are going to show up here are in his hands here it shows me the things that I've already attached to him in the tree but then down here I have some things that were found for him and his and you'll see those by that but as you can see there are a lot more records a more City directories and other things now this 1900 census does not apply to my George so just because I've clicked search doesn't mean that all of this is right but there's a lot here now on top of that there are additional records in ancestry that aren't going to show up on the search so once you've done some research and you have some parameters of where you're searching and what you're searching for you need to also use the catalog go down here go up there to search drop down to card catalog and then you can type in different things here that you want to search for a name is usually not going to do it for you here you're looking for locations or a particular type of record particularly locations but anyway you want to do some searches via the titles or keywords that might apply to your ancestor as well and you're going to find additional records that you're not going to find the other two ways so don't give up with just hints there's a lot more than that now the second thing that I have for you has to do also with those searches it's part of the search features as I mentioned a minute ago here we see the records that are currently saved to him and because those records are safe to him that means that ancestry is not going to look for additional records in that category like the 1910 1920 and 1930 census have been saved to him so ancestry is not going to pull any more records for George paston in 1910 1920 or 1930. now sometimes that's a problem because maybe I want to make sure that I've got the right George maybe I want to kind of be looking around and seeing other things so you can go right over here to the top side and you can unclick active and now now it's marked that it's inactive and that means that those records that were up there are also going to be shown here with the notation that they've been saved to my tree but if there are other individuals by that same name like here's another George Paston in San Francisco in 1920 and maybe I want to look at this and see do we have two George Paston's in the area that's the first thing so that tells me I need to be more careful about what I'm looking for and the second thing is maybe he was enumerated twice doesn't happen a lot but it does happen occasionally maybe I have the wrong record so sometimes when I'm looking for somebody I'm looking at that as well and I'm making that inactive I turned that off now the other thing that I want to tell you to do is to be sure that you modify your searches and you've got to just kind of play around with this um you might want to add in now I know that he lived in San Francisco and that's listed here three times because of the three census records but maybe I know that he also lived in in Washington State date and so that way I can search for him there and I can say I want to search it to exact that state and adjacent States one of the other things that I frequently do with women in particular is I'll change these last names and the reason that I do that is ancestry will automatically search for both names if you have a husband's name in there they'll automatically kind of search for it but sometimes it affects the results so sometimes I'll go in here and take out their married name and put in their maiden name or vice versa and sometimes in order to make that effective I need to remove some of these family members because that will force it into what it wants to do not what I want it to do so that's something else that you can look at so you really want to be playing with this particular function and you can also remove photos remove family trees and other things that maybe you're not interested in right now the other thing that I do to make it more effective to make these searches more effective is you've got to use these filters down here you've just got got to and there's lots of different ways that you can use them you can narrow down a census list to like let's say you're looking you have them in the 1910 20 and 30 census you want to see if you can find them in 1940 or in in 1900 um let's say you want to look for military records or you want to look in newspapers and periodicals you can select any of these and you can you can narrow things down this is also really helpful when you're looking for wills and other probate records as well as land records I might click on that so if you haven't been playing with the filters over here on this side that is something that you really really really want to do so make sure you get comfortable with that now the other thing that I really encourage people to do is to open the hint for more information and also for when you attach it to your tree. And let me explain what I mean by that. So if I click on this U.S. City Directories, it's going to bring it up on this side. And I said before I'm not a huge fan of this I always do two things I'll click on that and then that will open it full screen and then the other thing that I always do is I always always look at the image I'll open that link in a new tab and so here I have the detail that's here but now I want to look at the actual image and I want to zoom in to George paston and he'll be highlighted on most of these which is really helpful on Ancestry and I have his name Paston Geo, abbreviation for George, with his wife Aima, which correct. He was a steward on ships, and that's their address. And so, but sometimes, maybe the address has a different abbreviation next to it. Now maybe I don't understand what these abbreviations mean. I can move forward and backwards within the document in order to look up some of that information. So that's the first thing I always want to actually look at the record and I also want to see are there any other paths that are are there at this time in 1924 there's not he's the only one the other reason I want to save from this screen is that on some of the records it gives me an option when I save it to them that I could go back and do it but that takes time and I don't want to take clients time so I always save it this way this is particularly true on census records let me show you so here we have his census record in 1910 he was in San Francisco Assembly District 40 in San Francisco he was married he was the head of the household um if I were to save that via the side panel it wouldn't give me that marital status and any of that information down there now with children and stuff like that that can be really pertinent in addition when I'm saving a census record via the hint I can add in additional information let me give you an example all right so this is Georgette passed and his daughter I know she was in the 1950s census but she didn't come up in the 1950s census in the hints so I've done a search and it's not coming up in the initial search functions so I'm going to go over here to census and voter list and I'm going to say 1950. Wow! Now I find Georgette Paston Stevenson that's her married name and she's married at this point. Walla! First result. Wasn't in the hints. Didn't come up quickly on the search. So now I've got Georgette now I've gone over here I'm in this window over here and if I go to save it to her I have these functions right here and this is one of my time saving things a lot of times I'll add additional information in here I'll add like their ad their street address I'll add an occupation um I'll add if there's another family member living next door I'll put that information there that gives me more information on the tree when I go back to it and that's always really helpful particularly later on when you're looking at it again so that's one of my big time saving hints all right so my fourth hint is about adding a parent and dealing with children and I did this on one of my other videos and I had a lot of people going oh wow that's really cool so let me tell you really quickly so let's say Georgette has a son and he's done this Quam but I don't know for sure who his father is and so I put him in an unknown father so I have him in the tree and this will happen a lot sometimes it happens by accident when ancestry adds a family through the census records and it adds the children a lot of times it will put children in with an unknown mother and that takes time to fix when you know the mother she's already there maybe she had passed away previously things like that will happen, and they kind of drive me crazy. So for me, a quick fix if I have children that are under an unknown mother the first thing that I do is I add the name of their father who let's say his father is Elmer Quam, this is not true by the way. So now I have Douglas Quam as the son of Elmer Quam, but then I have this Elmer Quam here. Ad I could have had five children underneath here no problem now all I do is go to Elmer Quam and I use the little tool button and I merge with a duplicate and so I look for Elmer Quam in my tree and here's the other one and I am going to merge these two. And now all of a sudden, let me go back to Georgette Paston, now all of a sudden George, Douglas Quam is the son of Elmer Quam. That for one kid, not such a big deal. If there's eight kids, big deal! All right so now one of my other favorites is adding a photograph to a fact and a lot of people don't realize how easy it is to do that and I like it and the reason that I like that is it helps me to know whether or not I have the image for a particular fact or whether or not maybe I still need to get it so I particularly like this for like birth certificates death certificates marriage certificates but I want to give you an example with a marriage and instead of the certificate I want to I want to put in a photograph so if I go down here to the marriage of Georgette and George William Stevenson I can edit that fact and then I can attach media and so then I can look at the media that I've already attached to her and I can attach this wedding party media and just exit back out and now I have that marriage picture right here in this fact I can do that with a picture of a certificate I can do that with with lots of different things I really like that if I haven't uploaded the record yet or the media yet then I can still do it I can attach media and if I don't have the media I can upload media here and not only does that upload the media in the traditional way that you upload the media but it also attaches it to that fact in that one step that's another little favorite of mine by the way I can also attach a source to a fact so if I click on attach Source then I can choose the source that pertains to that marriage like if this were the correct marriage index I could choose that Source it's not it's their second marriage but I could choose that source and it would put it it would put it up there which now it would be a source for that fact one of my other little tricks pertains to the tree settings and the way you get to those is you go right up here to tree and you go to settings all right and I export my tree as a jedcom file sometimes for my clients and as a backup for me too and you can export your tree right here and now a jet com file is a file that can be used in any genealogy program but you can also change privacy settings here and here you can make your tree private with since this is a teaching tree it's private but I can also prevent the tree from being found in searches and as a professional genealogist I need to do that because I don't want people to be looking at trees that I'm doing for clients that's their private stuff and so I don't I I do that but you can make up public you can choose you can do whatever you want and then over here you've got invitations and now I can invite people I can invite somebody to share my tree I can add them by email or give or get a link to invite them or buy their ancestry username I can also select their role so like those tree settings and a lot of times people don't know those and some of the things that are kind of cool within them alright my last one is how do I do a census search now I do a lot of census evaluations for clients where I really kind of want to get a picture of who is living in a particular area and so that can be done by searching for them the way we had already talked about right looking at their hands searching for them stuff like that but sometimes I want to find all of the different individuals in a particular area by a particular name and so a census evaluation is really helpful for me and there's some cool ways to go about it I'll go up here to search and I'll do a census and voter list search and then I'm going to put in the name and I'm going to say and I'm not going to put in a first name because I'm just looking for that surname and I'm going to say that they lived in Miller County Georgia and I want to keep it exact to that County and adjacent counties and the reason that I'm including adjacent counties is because sometimes people were enumerated they were just like over a county line and so sometimes they lived really close to a particular County but some of those records like vary right so I usually do that and then I click search and now I'm looking I have the census and voter list already open right here and I'm looking at all the different Jacksons that I can find but I don't care about in here I want to look at Jackson's in 1850 and so now I've got a bunch of different types of Senses I just want the U.S federal census and now I've narrowed this down to 31 Jacksons that lived in Baker County Georgia in 1850. so that gives me a good idea of what's happening in the area with that surname that I use all the time and that is the fastest way for me to really do a thorough census evaluation there are occasions when that doesn't work because somebody's was their writing was so bad the family was indexed incorrectly but anyway that's my favorite so I hope these ancestry tricks have helped you I hope that it makes your ancest research is more effective I hope that you save a little bit of time and that you're pleased with some of the results that you're getting from your ancestry searches and the different ways that you can update your ancestry tree I hope you have a great day if you want take a look at this video right over here it's one that YouTube is recommending for you as well as this playlist that gives you some Clues on how to do better more effective searches