Ancestry hint.

[Wexflyer]

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....

[Essnell]

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.

[David Nicoll]

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.

[PaulineJ]

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.

[Essnell]

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    and move on... 
Essnell.

[Crumblie]

The problem with the hints is that the more people accept them it convinces Ancestry's software that it is right.

[coombs]

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.