2018 Genealogy Goals

In the process of that planning, I’ve written several goals in my genealogy journal. Knowing that I need specific goals that I can check off (i.e. SMART goals), I have broken them down into smaller steps. Below are some of  my broader goals:

• Get my tree indexed on Ancestry!
• Reduce number of shaky leaves on Ancestry
• Use RootsMagic’s link to FamilySearch to add sources for my direct line ancestors
• Connect with cousins on Facebook by sharing family photos
• Blog about my ancestors
• SCAN — I still have some photo albums to scan
• Clean up files (sadly I have duplicates of some photos and others that need re-scanned)
• DNA — update my spreadsheet of matches
• Finish doing visual phasing with my brother’s DNA results and then hopefully add a cousin or two
• Attend a genealogy conference
• Participate in genealogy study groups and round-tables

Perhaps I need to add a goal of tracking my progress!

Update – Ancestry Indexing

Randy Seaver’s recent Facebook post, “Mused about Ancestry’s indexing rules in their Member Trees and how my tree, with over 90,000 sources, doesn’t get indexed or searched” expresses my frustration with Ancestry Indexing.

Unlike Randy, I don’t have over 90,000 citations in my tree. However, my tree of over 11000 people has over 39,000 citations. Since I want my tree to be found, I have been ‘jumping thru the hoops’ in an effort to get the tree indexed.

I have reverted to the process I used prior to TreeShare. For each person with a shaky-leaf, I click on the hints button to see the list of hints. For each hint, I evaluate whether it is for the same person in my tree. If the hint applies to my tree, I check my sources to see if the citation already exists. In some cases, I update the citation or add media. If the citation does not exist, I create a citation in RootsMagic and download the media from Ancestry to add it to the citation. On the Ancestry side, I will accept the hint. I do NOT use TreeShare to bring down the citation or the media. Like Randy, I feel like a hamster going in a circle — especially since I’ve gotten rid of a lot of leaves and my tree still is hidden.

My frustration with having a ‘hidden’ PUBLIC tree is compounded by the affect it is having on my DNA results. For some reason, the list of ‘shared-ancestor hints’ for my mom’s DNA test has dropped to four when it was closer to 100.

Like my mother’s DNA results, I have lost about 100 shared matches in my DNA matches. Based on the fact that all of the circles for my mom’s side of the tree are also gone from my DNA results, it appears that there is something wrong with my mom’s side of the tree. Since these DNA shared matches and circles rely on whether I’ve accepted the shaky-leaf hints, I believe my tree issues and my DNA issues are related.

For now, I will continue to be patient and periodically call to check on the issue. My willingness to be patient comes from my work as a technology coordinator. As someone who was in charge of a small school network, I understand the frustration of trying to figure out what happened to the data. Unlike my experience, Ancestry technical staff is working with a multitude of servers and tons of data. They likely are also reeling from a ‘perfect storm’ this past summer when the servers were moved at about the same time that the ability to transfer data was opened up for both Family Tree Maker and RootsMagic.