I was convinced by a friend to update my Ancestry account to include the Pro Tools that are now available. It’s a relatively small monthly fee, so I decided to see what I thought.
It can be safely said that this was an eye opening experience. One of the first things was the Tree Checker. It identifies all of the potential duplicates in a tree, all of the items that have no sources, and other things that look unusual like birth and death dates that seem out of usual standards and some of those things.
I spent a couple of the really cold days here these last few weeks working on updating my tree and correcting these errors. One of the first things was to delete out people that I had imported as GEDCOM files years ago when I started genealogy work and who had a connection to me many generations back. None of these people had sources and if our nearest common ancestor is 8 or 9 generations back they could potentially be candidates for research later, but for now at least they are out of my Ancestry tree. Without being able to verify the details I didn’t want to be sharing something that might be incorrect and that I wasn’t going to research anytime soon.
There is also a wonderful shared DNA tool that allows for viewing common DNA Matches with one of your DNA matches. This has helped me place some people in the tree and made assigning DNA Matches to my tree much easier. That said, I’ve also been going through and assigning as many DNA matches as I can to the tree. I had done some of this work previously, but hadn’t gotten as deep into the task as I have recently. This should help some as I try to do some DNA research projects in the next year or so. The more of the matches that are identified the easier it is to place some of the unidentified.
With all of this work I have my “tree score” from Ancestry in the 9 or out 10 range. I feel much better about the tree I have now and am thankful that I did take a look at the Pro Tools. I think they’ll be a big help going forward!
Cory and Nicole Family History 