today we're talking about some of the new features that have been rolling out kind of quietly on the ancestry platform this been going on for a couple of months now and so we're going to be talking about some of the new DNA features some of the new tree features some of you know things you may be finding anywhere in the platform and there is a handout for this information about that is in the description box below if you are new here my name is Connie noox I am a lifelong genealogist here to help you go further faster and factually with your family history research there's so much to cover let's get to it all right the first feature I want to talk about has to do with the DNA match list so if we go over to DNA and we drop down to matches and I have already scrolled down here and have blurred some things out for privacy reasons but what is new is we no longer have the dots we now have these little colored boxes with a letter we can actually modify any of that if I click on ADD and then edit groups we can then add this person this DNA match to any of the groups now the ones that have a box around it means that that DNA cousin already is in that group when I first saw this it was a little confusing to me and so I realized oh wait a minute you know this H is already in there so you could rename these if you wanted to with the edit pencil right and then change this to a numbering system if you want I kind of like this because it matches my tree it did kind of change my color scheme because I had re you know years ago when I first taught this process of how to goup your DNA matches I had a color scheme on a tree so I may need to modify that but still just looking at your tree you could figure out you know what's what so if I jump over to my tree for a moment you can see here I have Mattson Jensen right which means all of the descendant that have this J Madson Jensen tag means that I know that this person descends from that ancestral couple does that make sense and so now we can edit these click the edit button we can change the colors we can change the the the naming if we want we can delete the group if we want and I'm going to go back we can add more and more so just the ones with the boxes around it means that they're already in that group but the little plus here means we could add that group to that person if we wanted to now what is interesting as I'm looking at these new ones is that I had originally colorcoded everything in warm colors meaning the paternal side and cool colors meaning the paternal side or the father's side of the family and now I'm starting to see the colors have changed so much that I don't have that ability anymore because Booth is definitely on my maternal side which should have been a warmer color so I may want to go back and recolored some of these and green just wouldn't make sense to me but anyway so I'm going to have to rethink how I do this you can still by the way star these if you want to keep them as a favorite basically and that way you can find the star group as well maybe you're working on a special project or something and you want to Star some of those that you are working on you can create a new group right here and give it a name give it a color so we have lots of colors to choose from we can even go black and green all kinds of different colors so that that's an improvement obviously we'd have to give it a name it's giving me this red warning that you can't do this without giving it a name so there you have it we have more colors that is something we've been asking for for a while here I am again on the DNA match list and if you click on more filters and then come down to where it says Parental sides and we're going to scroll down a little bit you'll see a couple things here it says custom label maternal Side Custom label paternal side you may or may not see this I had created this when I was creating groups for the maternal and the paternal side before ancestry started automatically creating maternal and paternal groupings so you may see this duplicated here it's the same thing in my case but this plus here this is what ancestry is saying is on your maternal side and so you would hit apply filters and go on this one up here is what I created back before they started doing automatic slicing and dicing and figuring out which side is paternal and which side is maternal okay you may see both sides you may see unassigned it just depends on your DNA test results here's a clever little trick that I learned from Donna Rutherford on her YouTube channel this is kind of cute so if we wanted to add this person uh add a group to this person so let's click here and we're going to create a new group now we can give it a color and we can give it a name right I don't know I'm just going to give it a name all right and then what we can do this is kind of cute I thought this was kind of clever let's say we're not going to give it a name but we're going to give it an emoji what she was doing is she's on a Windows computer on a Windows PC I guess I don't know about Mac you hold the Windows key down and you press the period button and you get a you get emoji screen right and you can I don't know click Emojis all you want and then you can create the group I'm not going to do that but you could it and you've got a whole little list of of of little uh emojis that you could add to it now you know you're very limited on what you've got but it could be fun so it says right here press the star button plus a period to use the emoji in any app so there's a tip for you now Donna is a great genealogist out of London and I was watching her video and she was covering some of these DNA uh tricks on Ancestry and she came up with a great little hack that I have to share with you and in fact she's going to I'm going to let her show you here in a second but it has to do with the number of PAG uh number of items per page and the number of pages you were seeing over here so with her permission I'm going to share that clip with you from her video on her YouTube channel and if you want to learn more about Donna's YouTube channel I'll leave a link in the description box uh to directly go to her Channel and to this video so here sorry this is a bit of a messy slide but if we just work down it you can see now that the a p page defaults to 20 or 50 um it it's it seems sorry it defaults to 20 but you can change it to 50 you can only step ahead one page at a time now that can be a pain if you know you kind of want to get to page 10 quickly here's a little tip for you if you go up to the browser so when you're on the web on a browser page and it will show me I'm on current page one and I've got 50 items per page I can go and change this in my browser so if I change one to 65 and then hit enter I'll immediately go to page 65 in my match list and similarly to get back to page one I can just going to change that back to one I'll end up back at page one I suspect they might put page number box at the bottom of the page again like they used to have but it's not there at the moment you can only page one page at a time through that there's no sort of fast forward button so you can't zoom zoom through your matches so in the meantime you can go where you want to go by changing your browser so just a little tip hey thanks Donna for letting me use your video in my video that clip was awesome and we appreciate it again for the audience that video link is in the description box and while you're there subscribe to her Channel now throughout the platform they have started upgrading and updating the look of the entire platform what we're going to do now is jump over to Origins so I'm in the DNA tab right DNA I just was in the your results summary you could jump straight to Origins from here or click on this box I'm going to just do it from here and now we get this map with my ethnicity estimates and one of the things that a lot of people forget to do is scroll down now they do have this AI assist over here which is kind of new I haven't really played with it much but if you want to understand a little bit about how that stuff is working you can certainly use that again it's in beta so just be mindful of that so we have your DNA inheritance and where it came from and for those you don't have a DNA test I promise you we're going to get to the rest of the platform here shortly all right so if we scroll down pay attention to this so my ethnicity estimates were last updated in July of 2023 this is June of 2024 typically these updates happen in early fall or late summer like September is time period so just know that maybe there's an update coming we don't know but this is my experience has been that they often will update it in late summer or early fall so be on the lookout for that because these ethnicity estimates will update and what happens is is as they're narrowing the regions because they're getting more and more test kits ancestry now has 25 million test kits out there and they have more than anybody else so now that they have so many test kits they are able to start narrowing the regions down which is one of the reasons why you may see differences in regions from company to company also so as we click into the different regions you can learn a lot more now this is not really that new however some of these AI features that we're starting to see Pop in are it can be helpful in learning about what's going on so you can play with that hey we're going to get back to that video here in just a moment but I want to let you know that genealogy TV has a website a newsletter and a Facebook page links for all of that are in the show notes below all right let's get back to it moving away from DNA we're now in the profile view and there's a couple little things that I wanted to point out here that are new this year for sure I don't know that they are new in the last month but these two little icons up here ask someone for a photo this was the kind of stuff that was being rolled out during roote and in case you were not aware you can send an email to somebody and they can help collab at on this specific ancestor and you can or and or send them a link directly from your personal email uh system or you can send them through the ancestry email messaging system so it's my understanding that they would not need to pay for an ancestry account in order to collaborate with you on this ancestor I haven't tried it if you have let me know in the comments how that's working out I would I would be very interested to know so ancestry is really working hard on trying to get family collaboration I've had many conversations with them especially during the root Tech conference and you could tell that they are really working to move into that direction okay the other one this is tree Checker this is part of the Protools we'll talk about that a little bit later this one here is the activity Tab and this is still in beta and you can see that I have accepted some records and done a little bit of work on this it looks like last year and then one this year but if you have asked someone to collaborate with you on this ancestor or whatever maybe you wrote an email to grandfather or somebody and said hey what do you know about this ancestor do you have a photograph whatever when they respond following that link that I showed you a second ago it should show up in this activity again if you've had experience with this with a collaboration put a comment in the comment sections I would like to know how that's working so one thing I want to point out here is on this activity tab this is not to be confused with the activity tab that is similar yet different in the tree view now we're going to jump over to Tree View okay over here in Tree View we have this activity we have tasks changes and viewers so similarly if we click on tasks we can see what tasks I have been working on so it says I need to work on my Simmons Line This is a task list for me to remind myself what I need to do next if this is something you want to use I use this just as an example I personally keep all of my to-do list things in my research notes but you could certainly edit or delete or add or you know heart stuff and if you're collaborating Others May see this as well so you could then say Hey sister could you do this research you know if you guys are working together so view comments and tasks in this tree tasks are only visible to tree collaborators to create a task add a comment to assign it at mention a person or group so again ancestries pushing that collaboration with groups and stuff all right so activities we go to changes I'm going to get rid of this provide feedback all right so here when we click on changes we get a list of things that I've been doing throughout the tree not just at the ancestor profile okay we can also see who has looked at the tree recently in the past 7 days so this is interesting to note that it says if people have turned off this feature their name won't appear in this list so here's somebody that was uh looking at my tree I could message them right from here again another collaboration feature so here I am in my profile how you get there is you click on your little face up there and then hit your profile now that I'm in my profile I'm going to scroll down slightly and you can see it says research interest you click edit you can see that I already have some in here but I can click edit and I can add information that about areas that I'm researching and surnames that I'm researching Etc ET okay so once you have this in your profile you can then go to the areas of interest and see what other members may be searching for similar locations or surnames so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go up to search member search and now you can search by username but unless you know exactly what it is it's not worth doing research interest is something relatively new that I haven't seen it at least I never paid attention to it so you can search say Simmons which I think is one of them and maybe I say Ohio and I'm just going to hit search and see what happens as you can see there's a whole mess of people here that are searching the Simmons name in the Ohio area so this might be an opportunity for me to go search around you may even be able to narrow it down to the county level which would be much more beneficial because you could spend days here just searching you know millions of different people by the same surname in the same state the trick here is that you have to have already put your interest in your profile in order for this to work at least that was my experience one of the questions I get a lot is how to turn on the dark mode uh this is a new feature in ancestry if you go to the three dot menu and you click on tree viewing options you can scroll to the bottom and you can turn on and off dark mode I find dark mode to be very helpful in just about everything I do anytime I can turn on dark mode I do because I spend a lot of time in front of the computer and it hurts my eyes after a while so uh dark mode certainly helps okay so let's talk about Pro Tools so Protools is an add-on to your subscription and I think in most places it's $10 a month so I get a lot of questions as to whether it's worth it or not it you do not need Pro Tools to do good quality genealogy research however it is helpful in a lot of areas when you're you know it's convenience let's let's say it's a convenience fee okay because there's a lot of things you can do one of the things that you can do is check for possible errors which is this little button over here you also have some extra features in the fan chart in charts and reports and the tree mapper those are the the big ones that are on this main page here on the tree so let's start with the fan chart so if we go over to the fan chart this fan chart is normally without Protools set at I think it's four generations five generations I think with Pro Tools you can go up to seven generations which is nice do you need it not necessarily because if you are let's just say you're at four generations and you want to search this person's deeper in the fan chart tree you can rightclick over it and say view tree and it will move Melissa here melissy I think is her name into the center so if we hit view tree she's now in the center and now we've gone out a few more Generations so do you need it it's convenient when you're ready to go back to the home person which I have myself in my settings set as the home person then it will put me back in the center by clicking the home button and it puts me back here and with Protools I can go out to Seven Generations I wish it was more actually you know we always want more right okay so that is the fan chart with Pro Tools you have tree Checker you can get the tree Checker from here so you click on that and it pops up with this new report so this new report says that my tree is a 7.7 good rating personally I do not care because I'm always focused on one ancestor at a time or one family unit that's all I care about I could hardly care less about all of the other little hints and things going on in the rest of the tree that I may have imported from decades and decades ago so long story short I'm always focused on just one person however there is a tree rating just saying so it tells me possible duplicates now this is something that I would be interested in it says there's 1937 people that are that have no docu dou umentation I'm not surprised because sometimes when I'm doing DNA research I am exercising the strategy of the quick and dirty tree just to fill out the descendants a lot of times I will use one record though to just verify it but doesn't mean that I necessarily attach that record to those people as I'm doing that then once I discover who that DNA cousin match is and I link them to the tree I go back and I verify all of that so long story short I'm not surprised only tree documentation I'm not exactly sure what that is honestly I have no clue no clue but it does filter these lists right so you can then click on more filters you can say uh you want to search by location this is a big one that a lot of people have been asking for from ancestry is the ability to search by location and at least you can search in your tree by location here you can look for possible errors you can turn off these filters and just get a full list let's go back to where we were let's see tools tree Checker and now I'm back to where I was and other possible errors you kind of have to play with it to figure out exactly what they're talking about with some of these but you also have this tool icon where it shows a lot of the Protools stuff right here let's go to tree mapper this is a cool one so here it shows you all of your people in your tree this is my tree up here okay and and where those people are we can go and say End of Line we could go paternal maternal so if we wanted to go to the paternal line and maybe I wanted to see the end of the line meaning how far out into the tree I have gone it's it's kind of interesting so you can stack your filters you could also stack your location so I do a lot of work in North Carolina so there's probably a lot there and it can keep narrowing now you can sit there and click on any of these circles and you get a list of people that are in that location now I think this is kind of cool now how useful it is it depends on what your research question is and what your your plan is here but you have a lot and you can also filter by your tree tags in my case I have some custom tree tags so maybe I want left off here which it doesn't show anybody there so I'm going to turn that off but if I was looking for people that were part of the Quaker Church in that area maybe there was a couple different Quaker Meeting houses that they belong to you could certainly do this now this appears to me to be an and feature not an or feature so this is paternal line and end of line so if I want to turn that off now I get a lot more so if I want paternal line and say the Back Creek this was a custom tree tag that I created so now I can say my paternal line and that were tagged remember I tagged them because I verified them in records that they were part of the Quaker church then I've got these people here I turn that off I might get a lot more okay so you just play with your filters so be aware that it's an and feature see I was already filtering to North Carolina paternal line and that one Quaker church so just pay attention to your filters when you are are doing this so if I turn all of that off now I go back to it would be cool if they had a clear all filters I don't maybe they have it at the bottom but they don't so ancestry if you're listening that would be a good one clear all filters and start again now another one of the features for Protools is if we go up here and hover over the tree options we have charts and reports now one thing I can tell you is that when you click on that it's going to automatically generate a report based on who's in the center well let's go find somebody else that might be a little more fun so I clicked into the profile by accident but here's how you can get back so you can get charts and reports from here you can check facts from here or if you want to go back to the tree we don't have the view in Tree in I missed this they used to have the view in tree here you now have to go up to tools and say view in tree and now we can now see William McFarland Smith in the view in Tree View so you can get to it either way you can get to the charts and reports that we're getting ready to talk about from the profile view or from the Tree View so if we were to do that from here and we click on that now we get a report that's automatically generated in a variety of styles I personally like the family group sheets I always have we have some new colored reports like we can have the oak report we can have a maple report so they've got a couple different designs here's the Birch I think they're kind of Nic looking reports if you wanted to print them out for a family history book or something at the holidays you can do descendancy reports you can do on andle reports you can do register style reports personally I think the easiest thing to read for anybody who is never really into family history or something and maybe giving it away or sharing it with somebody is the family group sheet report you can print it you can download it you could download it and put it together in a PDF so you could do a lot of different different profiles like this and then put it together in a book all really cool again this is part of the Pro Tools now if you'll notice there is a focus person here you can change the focus person if you want to enter somebody else's name so you could probably sit here and crank out a bunch of reports based on a family group or a family line whatever rocks your world so if you wanted to get back to him we could go back to him and now we're back here so if we go back to the tree view for a moment you'll see the focus person is down here at the bottom so if I had gone to another person let's look at his profile we could jump to it from here as well we could go to charts and reports and bada beinging it's going to remember where I left off using family group sheets I could then pick the oak style report if I wanted to I could then download it and then combine all of those downloads it's a PDF document so I could then combine these into a document using all these PDFs I just organized them I use Acrobat Reader to combine apparently there's lots of different options for that so that is charts and reports jumping back into tree mapper for a moment again a pro tool um thing they have this new try the beta tree mapper so if you want to click on that it's kind of interesting in that I believe this is only in the United States right now but it just gives you a the same thing different view so you can sit there and and see how many people that you have in each location now I can tell you this is it says people but it's really documents kind of so I know that I have some ancestors that appear in Ohio and West Virginia and Virginia one person like one ancestor that appears in all three states so he's counted every time in all of those States another one of the Protools if you come over here up to the top you have insights this is what I consider gwiz information okay so when I first came here I thought okay this is interesting it says the number one surname in my family tree is Davis and number two is booth and wall and Henley and so on okay cool that's what I thought I didn't scroll down so there's a lot more down here oldest person living in my tree is 135 years old I don't think so so that is something that I need to go investigate and clean up cuz clearly somebody didn't live to be 135 years if they did I'm glad to have their DNA in my maybe I'll live that long who knows there's which women in your tree had the most children 19 children I don't think so I'll bet you anything if I drill into this person there are multiples by the same name there's like three James whatever and so on so this is just a great way to kind of check your tree again in a different fashion who is the youngest married couple a three-year-old again I don't think so so again there's something Goofy with the dates there so clearly I need to clean that up so that is insights on Protools another highly requested feature that people have been asking for for a long time is the ability to print a list of all the people in their tree it's part of Protools so you can click find in tree and list all people and when you do you get this list of all people you can then download that list if you want you can view them all there's lots of them lots and lots and lots of them I personally don't print a list of all people in my tree it's constantly evolving I have four ,1 195 people as of today in my tree and a lot of things that need to be cleaned up and so yeah nobody's tree is perfect by the way I don't know if you remember when we were looking at that tree Checker and it gave us this this list of I don't know a rating a tree rating I again I don't care I'm working on that one person at a time so anyway that's some of the Pro Tools well in in other news from ancestry ancestry announced they colle collaboration with the National Archives and Records Administration also known as Nara in May 2024 they announced the new multi-year agreement with the National Archives to digitize and index publish and publish tens of millions of Nara records on their platform in the next 5 years this will be ancestry largest public private archive uh collaboration to date now also at roote ancestry announced that they had we moving to kind of a different membership model where it would be a worldwide all-inclusive plan with the only differences being an individual plan versus a family plan I recently checked with the ancestry and we're still waiting to hear back on any updates for this one but as of this recording we don't have any new news on that how would you feel if you could resolve some of those brick walls in your family tree or maybe you're just getting started in genealogy what if you had the skills to prove your family history taking you back Generation by generation time and time again hi my name is Connie Knox and here at the genealogy TV Academy I help genealogy enthusiasts like you break down brick walls by learning smart research methods I help you find the records and I help you get organized so that you can share your family history with your family and future Generations I do this through a monthly membership course there are two components to this now there is the self-guided platform where you can take the courses on your own time and well I'm adding one new lesson per month and then the live Zoom meetings where you can watch a live presentation in the virtual classroom and participate in the discussion after the presentation now if you can't make one of the live sessions don't worry all the programs are recorded and are added in the course platform following the presentation so are you ready to learn some new skills to help prove your family history get organized and break down some of those brick walls all all right well if you want to learn more hit the get start button to learn a little bit more about pricing and and how you can get signed up all right we'll see you in the virtual classroom [Music]