RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => Topic started by: Biggles50 on Friday 18 July 25 21:45 BST (UK)
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William H. Born 1746.
Hint for William H. In Ancestry for the Pension Ledger of WW 1.
There is serving your Country and being dead for over 120 years that do not add up!
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William H. Born 1746.
Hint for William H. In Ancestry for the Pension Ledger of WW 1.
There is serving your Country and being dead for over 120 years that do not add up!
That's nothing!
In the US some folks from the Revolutionary War era are still on Social Security books!
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I have an ancestor born in about 1555 and one of the hints for my ancestor was an 1851 census hint for someone of the same name.
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I very rarely bother to look at the hints some of them are utter ridiculous, I did look at two on my home page this morning. My paternal GRANDFATHER Who was John appears to be a WOMAN called Joan.
The wife of one of my Father's half brothers they have as a widow in Canada in 1880, that's the same year she was born in Ireland. She actually married in 1905 and died giving birth to her third child in 1915 four years before her husband. All the correct full facts are on my tree so there's no excuse for these howlers.
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I have an ancestor born in about 1555 and one of the hints for my ancestor was an 1851 census hint for someone of the same name.
So, the folks at Ancestry are optimists!
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I got a hint a few days ago for a deceased uncle...the hint was for my own tree.
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I have an ancestor born in about 1555 and one of the hints for my ancestor was an 1851 census hint for someone of the same name.
So, the folks at Ancestry are optimists!
Even so, such hints are well beyond silly.
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I have an ancestor born in about 1555 and one of the hints for my ancestor was an 1851 census hint for someone of the same name.
So, the folks at Ancestry are optimists!
Even so, such hints are well beyond silly.
Oh I know, they annoy the heck out of me too - but have to look on the bright side of life!
But what is worse is that many people accept these stupid hints, which Ancestry then takes as validation, and proceeds to put forward even more "hints", referencing the multiplying number of family trees incorporating said stupid hint.
It is a dreadful feedback loop to multiply garbage.
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This kind of thing needs adding to Zaphod99's recent post about "Suggestions for improving Ancestry" -- as examples of what is so badly wrong.
https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=892430.0
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Just to be contrary. I think the whole system is pretty amazing.
It has found me links I would never have found on my own.
They are hints, Ancestry can’t be blamed if humans blindly accept them as correct.
The one change I would make would be to be able to park hints.
I started rejecting wrong ones, but gave that up because I was always going, it is wrong for that person, but right for some other person in the tree and could never force the system to find the entry for the correct spot in the tree, to hand transcribe.
So on balance I will take the system as it is.
Roll on the AI document reading, I have seen a couple where it has managed an astonishing job, I can do better but largely because I know the obscure Aberdeenshire farm names being referenced.
Sorry turned into a bit of a rant 🙂
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Just to be contrary. I think the whole system is pretty amazing.
It has found me links I would never have found on my own.
They are hints, Ancestry can’t be blamed if humans blindly accept them as correct.
The one change I would make would be to be able to park hints.
I started rejecting wrong ones, but gave that up because I was always going, it is wrong for that person, but right for some other person in the tree and could never force the system to find the entry for the correct spot in the tree, to hand transcribe.
So on balance I will take the system as it is.
Roll on the AI document reading, I have seen a couple where it has managed an astonishing job, I can do better but largely because I know the obscure Aberdeenshire farm names being referenced.
Sorry turned into a bit of a rant 🙂
Tis good to rant.
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Some hints have been fab to be fair. One hint opened up on my great gran, and the fact that she was baptised again, as a teenager in Stamford Hill, London, as she was in a convent nearby at the time. The hint showed a baptism, and the details matched, from DOB to parents names and occupations. And it filled in much of her movements between her birthplace of Oxford in 1905,. and 1911 census when she was in Sussex by then.Until then I had no idea she spent time in London.
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Exactly that, I found people on the boat to Buenos Aires, would never even have thought to look …
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I initially rejected the hint that a child born in 1879 died in 1878 but went back to it after finding 17 trees show it happened. There's no way they can all be wrong and just little old me be right ;)
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I like to always check the original not just the transcription. Many people did not sign but left a mark but even a mark can be handy and distinctive. It is such an event that has made me cast doubt on others research that someone born in 1760 was the same guy who wed in a nearby parish in 1782. The 1760 guy witnesses a marriage, and the mark looks quite different to the namesake who left their mark in 1782. Always do your own research.
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I initially rejected the hint that a child born in 1879 died in 1878 but went back to it after finding 17 trees show it happened. There's no way they can all be wrong and just little old me be right ;)
Oh it can! years ago, I rather naively sent my tree to someone, very distantly related who then shared it over and over on Ancestry. I then found an error in my tree and corrected my mistake but all the shares still have the error, an additional child (baptised but no birth record, went back to my original records I transcribed at the RO to double check and it wasn’t there so I must have been seeing things at the time! 😵💫) Not one of the copied trees checked my records
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I initially rejected the hint that a child born in 1879 died in 1878 but went back to it after finding 17 trees show it happened. There's no way they can all be wrong and just little old me be right ;)
Oh it can! years ago, I rather naively sent my tree to someone, very distantly related who then shared it over and over on Ancestry. I then found an error in my tree and corrected my mistake but all the shares still have the error, an additional child (baptised but no birth record, went back to my original records I transcribed at the RO to double check and it wasn’t there so I must have been seeing things at the time! 😵💫) Not one of the copied trees checked my records
I've built the trees of several mystery matches and shown my grandmother is an NPE but my known matches don't research, they just copy the crowd and think they are descendants of William the Conqueror, Robert the Bruce and King Arthur. Strangely none of those are in my tree though my grandmother is the MRCA we all share.
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On Ancestry I have even had parent suggestions where the person himself is suggested as the father, and the person's wife is suggested as the mother, or the brides "potential parents" are the grooms parents.
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On Ancestry I have even had parent suggestions where the person himself is suggested as the father, and the person's wife is suggested as the mother, or the brides "potential parents" are the grooms parents.
The English have always had a reputation for this sort of thing....
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Hi Everyone,
Does anyone know if Ancestry hints can be turned off and or on.
I am constantly either dismissing or ignoring or explaining that I have the relevant information --- daily... to no avail. I have no intention of adding this to my online Ancestry tree. It's not just one , it is numerous ones. Most of which are already on other trees but are often wrong... same song as many above.
Cheers Essnell.
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Essnell,
Hi you seem to be able to turn off notifications in your user account settings.
Not sure if this turns the leaf notification.
I just tend to ignore them.
If I had turned them off I would have missed the fantastic tree written in about 1904 by a relative, of 5 generations of the Napier family of Clydeside fame.
He married one of the family. He also did one of his own family that my father came across.
It is these gems that for me make the hints worth the pain.
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My input would be thet you have to think of it as not so much as Ancestry finding a hint, it's simply passing on a hint/ record that some other researcher has found.
So that could be a (wrong) birth registration for a woman in her later married name rather than maiden name being accepted and propagated, OR the initial researcher initially knew something which the later researcher didn't, or used a site other than ancestry to find it, then added it to their ancestry tree.
What I see is I add a name (with skeleton dates/place) and get no hints. Then add a baptism or somesuch. Ancestry then presents a whole slew of hints for that person, presumably based solely on the fact that the baptism that I attached was attached to someone else who also had all these other records attached.
There's no wisdom to it at all.
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Hi David Nicoll and everyone here,
Thanks for the reply and your suggestions.
I have checked my account and amazingly most things on there were already turned off. So it seems that it does not affect the hints notifications. We will see as I have altered just one to 'Off'.
The obvious thing is that no matter what is the response that they get from humans re hints , it is ignored unless it adds to their data [to spread about]. And it could be wrong or it cold be accurate. They wouldn't really know.
My great grandfather's death has been a bit of a mystery, elusive. I had narrowed it down to a 10 year time slot and I had a reasonable date, but it was just an index record. Yesterday I bought a digital record which as proven it's accuracy. I have now got to chase a census record to completely verify the record. But others have on their account trees, a date twenty years earlier which was impossible given it was known where he was ten years after that date.
The Ancestry hint was not telling me anything just asking me to add info on him to my tree: by telling me he was missing death information !!!
May be just ;D and move on...
Essnell.
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The problem with the hints is that the more people accept them it convinces Ancestry's software that it is right.
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Even if you find a hint for a pre census ancestor who lived in rural Suffolk as having married 200 miles away in Staffordshire, while it sounds odd due to the distance in location, one other distant cousin may have found something to prove it, such as a poor law document saying they were in the army and based in Staffordshire at one time, or a will mentioning in laws in Staffordshire. It would take a lot of time to write notes onto their trees explaining their sources and findings. Often our research can rewrite this fallacy that 99.9% of people before 1900 stayed within 10 miles of their birthplace.