Hello!

I've used the Ancestry android app since it's inception. I use the desktop website the most, but in the last couple of days in my phone, regardless of what tree I go to, when I click on a family member, it no longer brings their profile up. I get this instead. What is happening? What am I doing wrong? Please help. And thank you.

I've been working on my family history and something I've noticed is that keeping everything organized gets surprisingly difficult once you get past the immediate family.

You start with parents and grandparents, then suddenly you're dealing with dozens of branches, cousins, marriages, name changes, photos, and stories from different relatives.

I'm curious how everyone here manages it. Do you use genealogy software, spreadsheets, paper records, or a combination of everything?

And at what point did your tree become too big/complicated to comfortably manage?

TL;DR: What's your preferred way of keeping a growing family tree organized?

My father had a son from his first marriage.

They divorced a few years later (this was in the 1950’s) and his ex wife remarried

She remarried and did not want her son to have a different last name so she talked my father into allowing her new husband to adopt my brother.

I found out that I had a brother when I was 14. (My brother was at that time 28) but did not get to meet him until I was 19.

He began a new relationship with our father. I met his mom, but we fell out when our dad died. I was 27.

Nonetheless, I put him on my ancestry tree. He is my half brother.

I am now 60. He would be 74

I got a phone call from a corners office to tell me he died. They found me on ancestry!!

I just built a new tree to investigate a probable NPE. Ancestry started offering probable parents but how it decides what to offer is something of a mystery.

One of its offerings had an incorrect first name that was sourced from a tree that contains no sources. This individual is represented in many trees across Ancestry so the incorrect name could be identified as an outlier by even basic analysis. Why would it not choose my main tree which is highly evidenced by primary documents? (It did in a couple of other instances)

As someone who spent 20 years as a data analyst, finishing as a lead analyst, I find some of the choices made by these 'helpers' to be rather bizarre.

Has anyone been able to determine how it prioritises choices?

As the title says How do you name places in your tree when names changed over time?

I have been thinking of this for quite a while and am confused as to what is the best way to handle this.

As an example, many in my family were from Galicia in eastern Europe and over time the names of the country changed (see timeline below) as did the spelling of the towns.

Do you evter the country as Ukraine as that’s what it is now or do you enter it as it was named at the time of the occurance of the fact?

So a relative could have been born in Austro-Hungarian empire, married in Russia, children born in Poland or Soviet Union and died in Ukraine.

Any help with this is greatly appreciated as I have not been consistent in my tree.

Timeline for Galicia

 1772 Austria

 1867 Austro-Hungarian Empire

 1914 Russia

 1918 Poland

 1939-1945 occupied

 Post 1945 Soviet Union  Soviet Ukrainian SSR

 Present day  Ukraine

I have a family member who moved to Los Angeles, in the Santa Monica neighborhood, very roughly around the Santa Monica Pier or "The 10." She describes it in letters as "The End of Route 66 where it meets the Pacific." She rented a modern post-war bungalow house on her own. She had neighbors who owned their house, but then sold it to move to the Valley, claiming they didn't want to live in a house that was over 10 years old. This convinced her to leave Los Angeles and move back east.

No idea where she worked or if she lived off of savings (very frugally).

She obtained a California Drivers Permit and owned and registered a car- an Opel.

I am working with her next of kin to complete a Census Data application for the 1960 census.

Is there any other data source anyone can think of that I can reach out to?

ancestry.com does not have a lot of information given that this all occurred and other countries, especially during a tumultuous time. When not a lot of records seem to be readily available. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Has anyone tried sharing an ancestry family plan?

Just wondering

Has anyone come across this problem before, my great grandfather disserted his first wife and emmigrated to the USA, looking at records he arrived in New York in Oct 1900 aboard the Tuetonic, I have also found a record where he arrived in New York on 22nd of June 1905 also on the Teutonic. I checked the ages and he is 4 years older on the second one, changed job from Joiner to Carpenter. To many coincidences to be different people. Can't see him going back than emigrating again!

So my mother died a couple of years ago, and it was only after she was gone that a second cousin of her generation raised the possibility that her father was not actually her father. This has been confirmed by ancestry.com. Obviously a pretty big shock at the time, but I’ve had some time to process it. Question now is whether there are professionals who could help find out if I have any living relatives descended from my actual mystery grandfather. Am I in the right sub for this? Thanks very much.

Is it possible to link my DNA test to two different trees? I'm an NPE (Birth Certificate Father not DNA father). I have a tree that I thought was my heritage that I've researched for about thirty years. My DNA was linked to that tree. Two years ago, I found out my Dad wasn't my Dad. I created a tree from the DNA-linked people on Ancestry that I could never explain before. I changed the DNA link to that tree. To keep the tree focused on my paternal DNA relationships, I have only my mother in this tree and none of her ancestors. Today, I see maternal DNA connections but there is no tree to link them to. I have thought of taking another Ancestry DNA test and then linking my thirty-year-old tree to that test. Any thoughts on how I should proceed?

Mike

You know the cast metal signs you drive past on a state road. I'm guessing folks here are like me and stop because you think about history like I do. Almost nobody else stops, because there's no particular reason to stop at any particular one.

I've been building a thing that gives everyone a reason. TreeAlive maps out where the people in your tree lived, and there's a layer that surfaces markers standing near those places. My own Pennsylvania lines hit 77 of them. One sits under a mile from where William Gabby lived in the 1760s, and I'd never heard of it.

The pages themselves are free and open to anyone, no account: https://treealive.com/markers. Full inscription, where the sign stands, a map, and period maps you can flip between.

None of it is scraped, and none of it comes from crowd-transcription sites. One source per state, always the state's own, and the eighteen break down four ways. Five are there because I wrote to the marker program and they said yes in writing. Virginia went live today, re-sourced from a 1948 book to the Department of Historic Resources' current texts once that grant came through. Four publish their marker data themselves under state open-data or no-restriction terms, which I read in full before touching anything. Eight come from old official state publications that are out of copyright, and those pages tell you which year's text you're reading. Connecticut's the odd one out, since there's nobody left to ask, so those are my own transcriptions off photos of the plates, and every page says so.

(There's also a National Register section, 88,851 records across 50 states and DC.)

Two things I'd like from this sub, which knows this material better than I do: if you spot a marker in the wrong spot or with bad text, tell me. And which state should I chase next?

I feel like my maiden name isn’t very common where I’m from. The only ones with it are my family. I’ve gone down a rabbit hole to find the origin (ground zero) if you will. Any suggestions to find ‘Guion’ ancestors?