Option to sort hints by nearest relative
If you have a large tree, you end up with thousands of hints. I would like to be able to process these according to the nearest relatives (e.g. Least number of links to me?).
|
Re: Option to sort hints by nearest relative
|
Re: Option to sort hints by nearest relative
With the new Ancestry page format you can do that just by navigating through your tree starting with the closest family and working back and process the hints as you go.
Joan
|
Re: Option to sort hints by nearest relative
To Joan I have 6300 people in my tree and 16300 hints for 4000+ of the people. It is not as easy as you imply unless you ignore everyone off the main branch of your tree. I do try and go manually level by level for the main relatives each side of the main branch. The 'All hints' page is useful (while you have a small tree), as you can quickly go through the hints, but with 16000 hints (and the fact that many hints add extra people to your tree), you would never finish if you lived forever. If it was sorted you could simply start at the top and accept/reject hints until you got bored and wanted to stop. Some of the hint sorting (e.g. Looking at photo or story hints) are very useful and allow you to home in on other relatives who are actively researching your relatives too. I think this extra 'Closest relative' sort would not be complex to develop, yet would be a huge time saver for people with large trees.
P.s. I assume you are referring to using the normal tree view and clicking on the waving leaves where you see them. If you are referring to some special way of processing hints from a separate page then please give me more info on what I'm missing.
|
Re: Option to sort hints by nearest relative
"... but with 16000 hints (and the fact that many hints add extra people to your tree), you would never finish if you lived forever. "
That's a pretty good reason to prune your tree.
|
Re: Option to sort hints by nearest relative
I am talking about going leaf to leaf working back through the generations of your tree. It actually works quite intuitively. I can't even imagine how you got 16,000+ hints without having checked and discarded or attache some as you went along. I currently have 99 sitting there for rainy day research time.
Joan
|
Re: Option to sort hints by nearest relative
I think one of the problems with the proliferation of hints is not so much the real records (although there can be a lot, especially when there is a stampede of adding a document to a profile based only on similar names - and the hints go out to everyone who has attached any other record that was saved to the same profile), as the 37 copies of the same photo that the system treats as unique, whether they were lifted from Find A Grave by ten people and then copied endlessly by others or, as happens so often, they are some junk "coat of arms" that multiple trees have separately uploaded to numerous profiles, thereby creating what the system thinks are 40 different photos.
To the OP: if your hints include trees, try turning them off and consult only from a specific profile when you are looking for new ideas. That might cut the volume a lot.
|
Re: Option to sort hints by nearest relative
I agree the duplication of photos is annoying and a separate enhancement request is well deserved to ask Ancestry to check for duplicate photos (e.g. If a photo has the same size in bytes or same MD5 checksum (say) as one already linked, it could warn you and ask you to confirm). However this is not my problem. Mine is simply the inherent issue that when you find a record (eg a census) it may find extra people (e.g. A parent, child or sibling). If you are strong-willed and don't add these people, then eventually you would finish your hints. However these people often reveal new clues and so I generally add them. These new people generate new hints and so it goes on. I think that the previous poster Joan would find that if she accepts the new people for her 99 hints then at the end of reviewing 99 hints she will have more than 99 new hints. They propagate exponentially.
|