Attaching obituaries to the tree

Here is a question from Noelle. You may respond in the comments. She writes:

When you are attaching a newspaper.com obituary how do you do it? I consistently save it twice, 1) in newspaper.com and 2) through ancestry which links the family members as well.

What does everyone else do?

Updates and completed family trees

Just a couple of reminders . . .

If you work outside the office, your weekly progress reports are due to me every Wednesday by noon, eastern time. If you have shared your log with me, there is no need for a separate update, but please make sure you've updated your log. I'm trying to provide an accurate report of our progress to senior staff.

Your completed family trees are due when you complete your assignment, not weeks later or when I remind you. It's fine if it takes you a few days to download them all. It's fine if you're sending out a couple soldiers on the completed list for checks and want to send me the assignment all at once. If you will be delayed more than a week in sending me your completed trees or saving them to the file server, just send me a quick email letting me know. This will help me keep my records accurate.

Please let me know if you have questions or concerns. Thanks!

New birth date rule

This is a rule that applies to your family trees. Please pay special attention to the birth dates. As you've all learned the hard way, some birth dates are better than others. When you add a document to your family tree, and it has the most complete date from the best source, mark it as Preferred.

In other words, if you come across a good source with a birth date that is more complete and accurate than any you've already attached to your tree, please mark that date as Preferred.

Always update family trees

Please make sure you're always updating the family tree. This is for three reasons:

1. We will be using some of this information as data.
2. In the future, we will be using the trees to help us decrease inputting time.
3. Filling out the tree completely helps Ancestry find hints, which will help you find more links in less time.

This does not mean you need to spend time adding every single city directory that comes up in the hints. You do not need to do that, but adding the city directories from years near the census decades would probably be useful.

Please make sure you do the following:

• Make sure all relationships are correct.
• Update names.
• Add birth, marriage, and death records.
• Add military records.
• Add all census decades.
• Add any other record that will be useful in generating hints. You are not required to add all records to the tree. Use your judgment, and make sure you're not spending too much time adding records that don't matter.

This will help our trees be more consistent and help you find more links to records.

Mother-child relationships

This is just a reminder that you should always make sure the mother-child relationships on your family trees are correct. When Chris creates the GEDCOM files that you use for your trees, he has no way to put the correct child with the correct mother. We would like to add this information as a variable in our data. Chris will be going back to the trees to extract it.

It's really important that you take the time to make sure all the children are connected to the correct mothers on your family trees.

Family trees

Please make sure your family trees are correct. That is follow all rules and naming conventions and make sure the information is correct. For example:

• Make sure birth and death information are correct
• Make sure relationships are correct
• When the GEDCOMS are created, we can't connect the children with the correct mother if the soldier had multiple wives. Please take the time to correct this.
• Delete duplicate individuals
• Make sure all the soldiers children are on the tree

Having all the information correct and updated on the tree will increase the quality and number of hints you get for that family. Additionally, in the future, not only will family trees be used as data, but they will be playing a larger role in the inputting process. So, it's very important that they be correct.

Information from public family trees

Here is a note from Sandy about getting death information from public family trees.

Don't intermix public family tree info with better documented sources for your obits.  Public tree info is QC 4, so you'd have to make your QC a 4 if you use any information that is found only on the public tree. For example, If you have only year of death on Find A  Grave, and you find month and day of death in a public tree, you should enter only the year in the obit screen.  You can put day and month in  the remarks, but do not enter it as data.

Don't forget your trees!

This is just a reminder that your completed family trees are due when you complete your assignment. The only reason you should delay downloading your trees when your assignment is complete is that you have soldiers out for checks. If you would like to keep your trees in your account after you've downloaded them, that's fine. Please do not make me wait for weeks then beg you for your trees.

Some of you do an excellent job of getting your trees to me in a timely fashion. Some of you do an excellent job of informing me of soldiers being checked, so I know not to expect those trees. I appreciate this.

If you can't remember the last time you downloaded any completed family trees, you might want to check and see if you have some catching up to do.

Maiden names on family trees

We've decided that you should list women under their maiden names on the family tree. If you do not know a woman's maiden name, please leave her surname blank. We are just trying to be consistent across people and trees.

When you're checking, and you notice that the inputter did not do this correctly, you may remind her/him about the above guideline. There is no need to take the time to change the family tree, in this instance, while you're checking.

You do not have to worry about not listing the woman's married name on the tree. Because her marriage is recorded on the family tree, Ancestry will know the woman's married name is her surname and will use it to generate hints.

Completed family trees

This is just your periodic reminder that you need to download your completed family trees (GEDCOM files). We are saving these files for future use.

When you've downloaded them, you need to save them to the shared drive (those of you in the office) or email them to me. Please do not make me wait a month after you've completed your assignment to get your trees. They are due when you complete your assignment. The exception to this is for work that is out for checks. You may wait until a soldier is checked before providing me his completed tree. Please don't make me email you and ask for your trees. It creates more work for me and makes record keeping more difficult.

As usual, some of you are really great at downloading and saving your trees. I appreciate that. If you need help downloading your trees, please ask for help.

Question about hints

There has been some speculation as to whether the family tree hints are getting better? What do you all think? Have you noticed an improvement in the quality of hints Ancestry is able to generate? Have you noticed anything else interesting about hints? Please share in the comments.

Alternate names on family trees

When you're adding records to your family trees, if the name on the record IN ANY WAY DIFFERS from the name you already have, please click the Alternate name button. Please do this for the soldier and all his family members. If you're not sure if you've already added a particular alternate name, go ahead and click it just in case.

This will help with analysis of some the name algorithms we've been working on (or something like that; I'm really not sure how it all works).

Completed family trees

Just a reminder that you need to download your completed Ancestry family trees. You may do this at the end of your assignment when you get your checks back. If you are in the office, you may save them directly to the file server. Everyone else should email them to me.

Many of you are multiple assignments behind in downloading your completed family trees. This is causing confusion in my record keeping. Additionally, some of the trees are missing. We would like to keep these trees, so downloading them sooner rather than later will prevent them from being accidentally lost.

Thanks to those of you who are really good about downloading your completed trees. It makes my life easier and is appreciated.

Updating birth and death places on the family tree to generate hints

Donna suggested the following tip to her checkee to help generate better hints on the family tree.

For the place of birth and death of the soldier, I like to input a place Ancestry recognizes. I find this helps Ancestry generate better hints. It doesn’t always help though, and it isn’t required.

For example, the mil info gives place of birth as Telmurker, NW. Ancestry doesn’t recognize this place though because Telmurker is a misspelling and NW is a generated code. Since Norway is so unusual, I would change it to only Norway without the city name.

Mil info gives place of death as Rochester, Olmista, MN. Ancestry doesn’t recognize this because Olmista is a misspelling of Olmstead. To figure out Olmista was Olmstead, I started deleting what had been input until Ancestry gave me an option in the drop down box. This doesn’t always work though because the places are too misspelled or they don't exist anymore. In those cases, I just put in the state.

Death and the public family tree

A question came recently about using public family trees as death sources. Here is Sandy's answer.

If you find a DOCUMENT (like the photo of the death certificate) on a public tree, it can be counted as a DEATH CERTIFICATE and given a QC1 (assuming it's your guy with proof of parents' names and birth date just like any other death certificate).

A document on a public tree is not the same as an unsourced date written in a public tree. A document is a document and should be treated as such.

Do not take PLACE of death from a tree when you got the DATE of death elsewhere (example Find A Grave). If you found a good death date somewhere other than a tree, then use that (QC3 or higher). If the only place you find the PLACE OF DEATH to go along with that death date is a public tree, then we don't want you to use the place of death, because public trees are last resorts only and are QC4. If each field had a QC, then we probably would allow adding bits of information from a public tree.  But we can't do that.

If you only find the place of death and the death date on the public tree, then you may use the information from the public tree as a QC4.

In a nutshell: a public tree can be used for death information if, and only if, it is the ONLY information you can find. Give it a QC4.  If the tree has a photo of a document as a source of death information, treat that document like any other document with the appropriate QC up to a QC1.

Hints and records and family trees

When using the hints feature on the family tree, it is not necessary to clear all the hints. Sometimes there are a lot of hints, and you have to balance the time it takes to look at them all with the value they bring to your search and to the data.

When it comes to military records, Sandy had this to say. If there are just a few and you're sure it's the vet's records (you know where he served by his RecId number), you can save them to the tree if you want. But you don't have to.  Sometimes the vet has more than 20 hints and you may not feel like doing all of them . By all means attach hints that you think might help you find your person.  It comes down to personal preference and time. Please do attach any 1890 veterans census that appears to the veteran (and any WWI or WWII draft cards for any of his kids).

ALWAYS attach vital records to the tree for the veteran, his spouse, and their children. Make sure you remember to attach vital records that you found on both Family Search and Ancestry. Vital records include birth, marriage, and death records.

Always attach records that will be input on the Grid to the family tree. Also attach any records that will help generate useful hints.

If you have any tips about using hints or attaching records to the tree, please share them in the comments.

Completed family trees

Just a reminder to download your completed family trees and email them to me or save them to the file server. Some of you, who are in the office, download them as you go. That's fine. Others give them to me at the end of the assignment. That's fine, too. Still others wait until I ask you a few times to get them to me. This is not fine.

If you've recently (or not so recently) completed an assignment, work out a plan to get me your completed family trees. It's OK, if you want to wait to download the tree until after a soldier is checked. Just let me know that's what you're doing, and don't forget to send the tree later.

We're having a problem with people waiting too long to get me their trees. By the time they get to the task, they've lost the trees. We have several missing family trees in Project 1.

Soon, we will be testing a new tool that will require you keep up with your family trees. It's a good idea to get into good habits now.

Reminder - Completed family trees

This is just a reminder that you need to download your completed family trees in a timely fashion and get them to me. Either save them on the shared drive in the office or email them to me.

Some of you do a great job with this. Others are in need of much improvement. I'm finding that if you wait too long to download and give the trees to me, you are losing trees. Most of the time, you are able to find the missing trees. But there have been several cases in which you've been unable to locate the missing trees. That is, you deleted them from your account without downloading them.

We would like to keep these files, so please make sure you download them and give them to me.

An appropriate time to give them to me is when you've finished your assignment and the soldiers have been checked. Some of you download them as you go. That is fine. Please come up with your own system and stick to it.

Family trees

If you have many family trees in your account, you might have some problems with the functionality of the trees. These problems occur when you're working with trees on page five or later of your list of trees.

The problems include:

• Auto complete will not work in the search screen
• You will not be able to save something to your tree from the preview screen

To fix these problems you may:

• Delete some of your trees (after you've downloaded them and made sure I have them)
• Rename your trees by adding "_" to the front of the file name. This will bring them to the top of the list.