If you sign up for an Ancestry trial, you must take action if you don’t want to pay for the subscription after your trial period. In other words, if you don’t cancel the trial, Ancestry will charge your credit card. Some people have reported problems with canceling the trial. There should always be a fix … Read more
You can create a free Ancestry guest account that gives you limited access to their features and record collections. This article will run through exactly what you can and can’t do with the free access. We’ll also give you tips on making the most of the free tier. Registered Guest Accounts On Ancestry The company … Read more
I see a repeated conversation on the genealogy forums that starts with someone asking when Ancestry will improve the Shoebox. Usually, a reply mentions a rumor that the feature will be dropped. And there’s bound to be at least one person wondering…what on earth is the Shoebox? This article aims to be a complete guide. … Read more
Ancestry owned Family Tree Maker for over a decade before Software MacKiev acquired the desktop genealogy software. The software is available for purchase from the MacKiev website. Family Tree Maker (or FTM to its fans) has been through six owners by my count. It has an interesting and checkered history. Read on for the juicy … Read more
Do you want to split your Ancestry family tree? You may have started one tree for yourself and your spouse, and now would like to separate it into two. Or you may wish to split a branch into a new private tree while you’re looking for supporting records. Ancestry.com does not have an online feature … Read more
Ancestry used to have a smartphone App to find possible famous relatives. Many people enjoyed the We’re Related App as speculative fun with the occasional correct suggestion. Ancestry disabled the App in 2019, and hasn’t released anything similar yet. Finding a famous relative or ancestor can be a great advantage to your genealogy research. There … Read more
A half-sibling relationship cannot be added to an Ancestry tree without first creating their common parent. Sometimes you have the details of the siblings but don’t know anything about their parents. You may also encounter scenarios where two siblings have been incorrectly assigned both parents in your Ancestry tree – and you want to fix … Read more
The default relationships in an Ancestry tree are biological father, mother, brother, and sister. But families are more complicated than that! You can add step-parents, foster parents, and adoptive parents to your Ancestry tree. There are also some other less common relationships available. It’s not obvious how to do this, so we’ll give you a … Read more
I tested the merge of two Ancestry trees with RootsMagic 7. There were plenty of issues with the merged tree. However, it was easier to fix the issues than to create a merged tree manually. This article has a step-by-step guide to the process. But before I give you the steps, I go through the … Read more
It would be nice to have a one-click process to add an unrelated person to your Ancestry tree. Unfortunately, the steps are a little convoluted. One way is to add a “fake” relative to any person, and then remove the connection. This article starts with a step-by-step illustrated walkthrough. We’ll touch on another couple of … Read more