Re adding parents of spouses, I usually do this, because in my mother’s family, there is a lot of tree collapse. I add those parents, because sooner or later, I’m going to find another marriage to that same surname, and having their parents names is a head start on finding out if these two spouses are related to each other. This has happened repeatedly.

My family has overwhelming lived in the same small geographic area for more than 150 years so I add every relative and their relatives - even parents of cousin's spouses. This has helped me close gaps and break down barriers. I have one large tree with lots of rabbit holes which I enjoy researching as a break from times of difficult research. Also, FTM has a duplicate person finder tool.

I’m so glad you brought up not adding the spouses of more distant relatives! I stopped doing that a couple of years after I started at Ancestry when I realized how massive and unwieldy the tree would become. I still run across those I did add early on and remove them.

That all said, I don't mind going down rabbit holes as I trace out cousins because that's usually how I find other living cousins to connect with and compare notes. Typically that cousin has information I need on a part of the tree my family wasn't as connected to, so it's usually a win-win.

Staying focused and adding siblings is a double edge sword. Siblings can assist in identifying the mother’s maiden name if it is used as a name of a child. I sometimes will add children and later delete them. Some of my ancestors were prolific with over 10 kids.

Sometimes there is more than 1 person out there with the same exact name, born in the same place and time period. I typically take everyone in the census record, and then go back and merge the profiles if they are the same person. When you do a merge in Ancestry, it saves the other name as an alternate fact automatically so both names are still there. It can be a real pain to unmerge someone if you accidentally merged the wrong people so I only merge people when I am certain they are the same. Sometimes there are people in the family with the same or similar names. I have seen it on a few different occasions where one of the children named died young and the same parents have another baby with the same name. I try to find birth records first to see if the dates are the same. If they are off days, weeks or a couple of months, that could be caused by a clerical error. When birth records are not found, a christening date may be used instead. If you happen to find an earlier DOB, then that may be the actual birth date. The same goes for death dates. You may see 3 different death dates for a person, which can be the actual date of death, the burial date, or the probate date. One other thing that may be confusing is that the month and day are the same, but the year is off by 1. I'm not sure what causes that, but it is fairly common, especially when researching pre-1800 people. Another thing to be aware of is old style dates. Some people had different dates of birth depending whether or not they were born when the Julian calendar was still in use. When the Gregorian calendar was adopted, the calendar was actually moved ahead several days so you may run into old style dates on some very old gravestones.

Generally, the only time I add spouses parents is if there are siblings who also married into the family, but I don't include other extended family. That being said, I do have some extras on my tree because they have some historical/famous connections. Eventually I would like to move them off. The tree I'm working on right now is a large family. Loyalist settlers, the families all inter-married so a lot of similar names (even found a possible connection to my husband's family, small world). I'm being so much more methodical in how I build this tree compared to when I started my own. It's paying off. After I do add my research, I compare to other family trees. I've noticed a lot of lazy people, no birth/death dates even though they have a profile picture that shows the dates, maiden names missing, when again, it's right there in the documents, half the siblings missing or names that are obviously wrong. I'm proud that I've been able to build such a comprehensive tree so far.

One reason I had for adding and exploring the in-laws, etc is that I was finding where more than one blood kin of mine would wind up marrying into the same family tree of in-laws. Things got out of hand over time so now I'm doing it ONLY when I see an in-law surname that catches my attention as being one that I've seen before (actually helped solve a DNA match mystery because of that practice --- an adoptee matched two different branches of my tree & it was only when I saw a familiar surname from branch#1 show up as an in-law in branch#2 that the adoptee started to make sense in my tree) My current practice is to immediately "ignore" any hints (from the show all hints interface) that are put forth for someone that ancestry says is an "in-law" because I know if I have reason later to suspect a situation like above, I can always find the ignored hints on the person's profile page.

I originally inherited my family tree, from a mostly undocumented. as I started to fill in the documentation. since I came from mostly offline work to Ancestry about the time That The Master Genealogist stopped prodction, (was on before but mostly for research) that work in documenting my inherited tree, led into a issue of Newspaper Articles and my Husemann family, an article listed a person with my 3rd Great Grandfather's name, this led into the Rabbit hole of figuring out that there were 6 Untrelated Huseman(n) families in my county and surrounding county, with that I started tracing at least 3 generations on in law families. for two reasons. several familes married between the Husemann families, seperating those in laws also helped to seperate when Husemann family it was (I swear, I can see the meeting of the elder Ladies laying out that the names for the children need to be in this order for the year they were born) I did make it back to Germany recently and those 6 Unrelated families are now down to 3.

Good suggestions. I also learned how to properly add nicknames to a person.

I like the way you explain what you're doing. Very important advise. My tree is not a typical family tree. It's about pioneer settlers and their families. Mildred or Dilly could have already been in my tree as a wife. I would have added the boarders to see where they lead too. It's very interesting to me to see how these families married into every other pioneer family. There were not that many people during the 1800s. The town I'm working on has no cities of villages. Just hamlets. It's all rural farmlands.

Two things I do: Never, never, never, never add directly from someone else's tree. Look at the original document. For example, the censuses and do not assume the transcription/spelling is correct. You can add so much more info Ancestry sometime does or doesn't include in the 'record'; occupations, name of employer, actual street residence, actual date of census (those that have them)...and clues as to who's in the household or no longer (did they die, marry and move out, etc.) And did I mention never add directly from someone else's tree!

I typically add parents of spouses because that's one way of determining who someone exactly was in a few centuries down the line. Especially if tracing a maternal line. I don't add a spouse's siblings, just their parents. And older family bibles and such would do the same thing by listing the parents of a spouse, so my rationale is I am continuing that trend. I can't say how much my butt has been saved in historical research by that tradition so I carry it forward for future members of the family.

This new AI format is driving me up a wall. I have seen so many mistakes already and I have been doing this for two days now. I want to add an aunt on my mom's side of the family, not one tree so far has added her. I know her well and am shocked that others have not added her. I did write a note to a spot that said something like is this correct. Not sure of the wording and not sure it got to the right place. How do I add her? ... Also I'm having problems with the mistakes I made. You make it look so easy. I don't know how to correct things yet. I want to quit already but my husband gifted this to me. I know it is expensive. I already had an account and had to start all over. They charged me full price on this special and should have put me back onto my other tree.

If I followed this advice, I would not have found connections to the Salem Witch Trials, William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition, three US presidents, an many other interesting connections.

Agree with adding people but having to be really careful merging in ancestry. It’s such a pain But I do believe it’s for the better of all names known are added on a forum like ancestry. As long as you have your citations. It’s better to have them for a later time if another reference of the spouses name comes up from long ago when the families could have been traveling together from Europe to US or more likely from initial groupings of families would migrate across early US together. Many times I’ve found that other family’s name in another source and searched tree to find that spouse which led to the generation before’s location for both families.

Who gets put on my family tree...1) Ancestors (duh), 2) Other spouses of my ancestors if they were married more than once, 3) All siblings and half-siblings of my ancestors 4) All legal spouses of my aunts/uncles/cousins, 5) Any children they had, biological or adopted. Who does NOT get in the family tree...1) Parents of spouses, 2) Other spouses of spouses, 3) Other children the spouses may have had -- e.g. step-siblings of my blood relatives, 4) Romantic partners where there was no marriage and no children, 5) Close friends.

I have researched a family line for twenty-five years and have nearly 25,000 linked names in my FTM. So you can say I have been down the rabbit hole a long time. At my age, definitely my winter years , I want to put all the information on Ancestry for all to share. I don't necessarily want all my notes in my Ancestry tree. Any advice?

Since virtually all of my great-grandparents came to the country from Ireland or Germany, I started with them and took an approach of "down and out" - I add their children and their spouses, then all of their children and their spouses, etc. I don't add family members of spouses who married into the family, with two exceptions. One of my father's aunts married a man with the same last name, and both of their fathers had the same name and came from Ireland. I see these families mixed up and in different combinations in lots of other trees, so I made sure to include the other couple as the groom's parents to show that they were two different people, and whose spouse was which. The other is my mother's stepmother, who raised her and I was close to as a child; I wanted her family included in my tree, too. Luckily, I haven't had to merge people too often, but sometimes one creeps in, lol. I don't know if it was one of your videos, or Ancestry's, but a tip was to look at the alphabetical list of people on your tree to try to identify duplicates. Also very useful for checking location formats, because it's so easy to accept one that doesn't fit your preferred format. Thanks for another great video!

My main tree is also my DNA match research tree. I have all sorts of people in it that don't need to ultimately be in it, but they need to be there for now. I also have a biological pedigree tree. It will likely end up being my main tree eventually, without all of the in-laws of in-laws that the current main tree has. In regards to nicknames, although I sometimes use the alternate name feature, I usually put the nickname in the suffix field in quotation marks. I was told that Ancestry ignores the suffix field, so I can see the nickname at a glance and not freak out Ancestry's search engines. Thanks for another great video, Devon!

I ONLY add people manually. If I find new persons in a census at Ancestry I look at the "Suggested Records" column and carefully go through each one comparing data to have a better determination if they are the same person in that particular census (or other record). Sometimes they are not. I mostly do surname research so I will probably add them to that surname research report anyway even if they are not my specific family ;-) It may be helpful to another researcher. In fact I am so often doing surname research (or in the case of Italian research -- location research of ALL surnames) more than adding to my online family trees these days anyway. ;-) Or continuing my online Italian language lessons. It all helps.

Great vids! Very helpful for newbies ❤ I’ve come across a grandchild listed in an early census. Should you add them as a new person even though you don’t know the parent at that point? I’ve been skipping it and keeping a note for later… just in case. What would be the best practice?

I find it so much easier to merge from the record instead of merging two people.

I never add parents of spouses. When putting alternate names of a person I use the tab "Name" insted of "Also known as". Then you see the alternate name on the top of the page insted of the bottom of the page.

I try to add the parents of someone I’m researching spouse. For example, my cousins spouse. I would add their parents and any relevant information I can quickly find, not a detailed search for them. My rationale is, in the future someone reviewing my tree might really be researching this spouse or someone with the same/ near the same info. Having the parent info helps them or I to quickly determine ne isolate correct people.

You overlooked what may be important info on the census. One of the individuals was listed on the census as being born in Arizona but your record shows New Mexico territory. No comment from you. You offer no sources for Dilly being Mildred other than your word. Dilly's record has no facts listed at all. Why would you claim Dilly and Mildred are the same person? Don't you need records showing the same birth dates or spouses or something before claiming they are the same person? Couldn't you have added the name Mildred Moss as an alternate name so you didn't need to re-add the name Dilly? Then you just make Mildred the preferred name. Why was Austin Parker Moss even added to your tree if you had no sources to back up the name and birth date/place? Where did his name come from so we know that Austin C and Austin Parker are the same person? It seems to me that many mistakes were made in this video that do not advance your stated reason for making this video.

Don’t add the roomers unless you prove that the rumours are right!