Building The Ancestry Tree: The Process and Discovery

The mere thought of building a tree on Ancestry, can seem daunting, especially if you don’t know family members past your Grandparents, OR when you don’t even know the names of you grandparents, or in my case my paternal Grandfather.

 I know when I first started in 2005, I had NO clue , like a single one, as to what I was doing. I just kind of heard it was fun and little by little, I was receiving new information about the family.

When you start a new tree, you will see this:

The Home person is who your tree will revert back to whenever you go deep diving into different branches. Mine is set to my Maternal Grandmother. Most people have their home person as themselves. In the tree settings, it will ask who YOU are in the tree. That’s where it’s set to myself.

Going through the tree privacy settings, it will ask you do you want your tree Public? Or Private?

This whole Public tree vs Private tree. Can you speak English??? I remember I found this lady named Deb’s tree and I thought it was the coolest thing ever because she had photos and maps and all kinds of cool stuff. She gave me an invite to her tree and allowed me to see the living folks. Well, being a novice and not knowing the etiquettes, or if there even were any, I began to save the photos from her tree. I reached out to her and she replied to my Message:

Needless to say, she blocked me from her tree and all messages, lol. Remind you, I was a novice and didn’t know WHAT I was doing besides from clicking buttons.

Back then, I had NO Clue as to WHY she blocked me, but as I got deeper into research and began paying for records, spending countless days and years on brick walls and FINALLY solving the puzzle, I decided that I didn’t want some random stranger that I may or may not be DNA connected to, just up and COPY in 30 seconds,  all the information that I worked so hard to get. My tree went from public to private, REAL quick!!!! Now, I actually get offended when people ask to see my tree. I got burnt, I had given permission to some DNA cousins to access my tree and they put ALL my PRIVATE information on their PUBLIC tree!!!! So Now my private info is for the world to see…… YES, I know, it gets real and deep out here in this Ancestry world. 

I never print the census or documents, I will say I started that way, but ink, binders, paper, etc. just became too much. I love being able to just take and glance and click on the tree.

There are SOOO many rules and do’s an don’t in the Ancestry community. It’s super time consuming, and the last thing you want to do is spend time building a tree just for it to be wrong records and wrong ancestors.

NEVER EVER EVER NEVER, copy the information off of someone’s PUBLIC tree, it’s definitely not guaranteed that all or Any of the information is accurate. My personal rule of thumb is “Never Trust Anyone’s Information But Your Own.” I may glance at a tree to look for clues, But I still read ALL of my own census records.

People have the tendency to just copy copy copy for the sake of numbers and Never actually read the census documents. Kind of like friends on Facebook or connections on LinkedIn, some people build trees for the sake of numbers, they just want to build the “biggest” tree ever, without actually taking the time to PROVE the connections, marriages, or even maiden names. Now we got 50 incorrect trees out there being circulated because ONE person was too lazy to read the census or any documents. Incorrect research is like a Bad virus, it just keeps Spreading! Names just being made up. Like the “Rumor Exercise” by the time that rumor gets back to you, it has an elephant in the story that was sleeping with the duck and still lived at home with his mama. Whew chile, I’ll tell ya!