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Familysearch tree hint system

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  • 15-10-2018 6:38pm
    #1
    pinkypinky
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 6,622 Mod ✭✭✭✭


    Has anyone tried this?

    It's pretty poor. I generally do not add in complete birth dates for my grandparents (though they are all dead). It gives errors if I don't put in a proper date and wants me to select weird versions of Dublin as the "standardized location" where people were born or died.

    As you go back in time, it's common not to have a full birthday for lots of ancestors.

    Worse still, it keeps suggesting people with a more common but similar name to my own.

    Genealogy Forum Mod



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    #2
    pedroeibar1
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,108 ✭✭✭pedroeibar1


    I agree.
    Soon after Mackiev bought FamilyTreeMaker (FTM) from Ancestry they dropped Ancestry ‘hints’ and switched to ‘hints’ from Familysearch. (A hint is signified by a blue square on a name in the FTM tree.) I rarely use that facility because it is useless. I don’t know if the fault lies with Familysearch or FTM, but invariably it produces a rubbish result. In addition to some date and many location issues, the Soundex algorithm would appear to need considerable tweaking – I too have found that many of the suggested surnames are quite dissimilar. What is worse is that the surnames are not always clustered phonetically and one has to scroll through many pages of dross to ensure a complete search. Also, and not their fault, as I’m stuck using ‘bogband’ it is very very slow to load/roll-over.
    FWIW Ancestry’s hints on FTM pre 2016 were poisonous as they also linked to public trees on Ancestry and the spurious ‘connections’ of ancestor collectors.


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