Today, I checked my Ancestry.com account and learned that my favorite subscription database provider has found 17,987 “hints” for my research. Many of these are for my Huskonen-Dingman-Van Court-Scheppelmann family tree. But many others are for the some 50 trees that I have created for ancillary research projects, including some for myself and others for friends and students of my various genealogy classes. FYI, my four-part family tree covers me and my wife and will benefit our children and grandchildren, as well as collateral relatives.
In looking at some of the hints recently, I have been very impressed with the quality and scope of what Ancestry.com has found for me. Many are ones that I would not have looked for even if I had access to the respective collections, libraries, or repositories — simply because I had not idea that the records existed.
I will be spending more time in the coming weeks and months looking at these hints and selectively adding them to my main tree. I will be adding facts to other trees that I have created to explore relevant surnames in America and in Finland, the latter being the birth country of my paternal grandparents.
Ancestry.com has made a very important addition to each hint listing: If the person of potential interest is related to me, Ancestry.com calculates and provides the relationship to me. I don’t know when this feature was added, but I think it is really great! It helps me focus on those hints of most interest, even if I don’t have the person’s family name “top of mind.”
Hats off to Ancestry.com for adding this feature to its Hints listing!
Now, I’m going to get to work sifting through those thousands of outstanding hints!
Boy, that is a great list for you. I hope I could stick to finding my hints as well as you….which means that as family historians, even little bites daily can make a difference.