I say unused ProTools because I have used the clusters and Shared Matches a lot. I have not used some of the other ProTools.
Familyhistorydaily.com has a good article on ProTools. On my Tree menu at Ancestry, I see this Pro options:
There is a Tree checker and Charts and reports.
Looks like I have 9483 people in my tree. This includes my wife’s Butler family.
Here are some filters and stats:
Despite all these errors my tree gets an 8.9 rating.
If I choose direct family line, all possible errors, I get 178 entries. If I choose duplicates under all possible errors, I get 32 people. That seems like a manageable number:
Let’s look at Thomas Clarke on my list:
If I hover over the ‘i’ in a circle to the right, the note says, “possible duplicates”. There are also some hints, but I am not concerned with that right now. I press the ‘i’ in the circle and it goes to profile view for Thomas Clarke in a new window with this note to the right:
I want to review this to see if I agree:
Scrolling down, I see that this Thomas Clarke has the right wife:
This is his second wife, the one I do not descend from. At this point, I will take it on faith that if I merge these two people it will solve more problems than it will solve. Now I am down to 31 direct ancestor duplicates.
Finding Direct Ancestors of Other People
I would like to find direct ancestors on my wife’s side. How do I do this? I do not see an easy way to do this. I suppose that is one of the problems of having my wife’s tree connected to my tree. I can try a workaround, but it is not very good.
My wife’s father’s mother was French Canadian. I can filter for Quebec:
Unfortuantely, this does not give me all the people who lived in Quebec, just the ones that I specifically designated as being from Quebec in my tree:
Also, these are not necessarily my wife’s direct ancestors. I do know that Joseph Pouliot is my wife’s ancestor. Isn’t an ancestor a direct ancestor?
When I choose Joseph Pouliot to evalutate, I get this message:
Joseph married a Josephine. Could that be the issue?
Also this 1700’s Joseph Pouliot has no birth date:
Here is birth date:
Here, fils or son is underlined. After making that change, I still see a duplicate for Joseph, so the confusion must be for his wife. I guess I’ll have to live with some Ancestry possible errors that are not really errors.
Using the same logic, I sorted by lived in Prince Edward Island:
I recognize James Henry Ellis as a ‘direct’ ancestor of my wife:
The sketchy right hand of the comparison has Henry Ellis and one child, but they match, so I will merge the two. When I do that and refresh my list, there are only two who lived in PEI that have possiible errors.
Map View
The article I mentioned above shows how to use Map View.
Here are my direct line ancestors:
A lot from the US.
Direct line paternal:
England, Ireland and the US.
Direct line maternal:
Latvia, Germany, England and the US.
Back to Duplicates
In my Summary and Conclusions, I mention that finding duplicates may help in inaccurate ThruLines. I often have trouble on my Hartley Line:
This could be the source of my problems. Further, I am not so sure that Robert was born at Bough Gap. That was a possible guess. When I choose the ‘i’ in a circle, I see this:
This is exactly my problem that I am trying to fix. Robert Hartley was certainly not Robert Wilkinson. Robert Hartley’s wife was Mary Pilling. Robert died and Mary remarried Robert Wilkinson. I will be glad to choose ‘not a duplicate’ and hope that will correct many ThruLine errors. I get balloons for pushing those two links:
View all errors for this tree just brings me back to my unfiltered tree error list.
I am honestly baffled as to why Ancestry computers thought that Mary Pilling’s second husband was the same as the first – especally after the first husband died.
Frazers on My Duplicates List
I am familiar with my Frazer ancestry:
My Second Great-grandfather George William
The George on the right looked good until I got to wife and children.
After working a bit on the list, this is what it now looks like:
Summary and Conclusions
- This Blog covered some of the Pro Tools that I have not used yet
- Duplicates are always a problem. I suspect that I should go through my 31 remaining direct line possible duplicates to try to fix those. This may even help in some of the ThruLines. After I wrote this I did find something above in my Hartley Line that was apparently causing a lot of problems.
- I can find some of my wife’s ancestors but not a comprehensive list of her direct line ancestors due to the way that I set up my Ancestry Tree. It would be an improvement if Ancestry gave you a focus person choice and then you could look at their direct line ancestors.
- Now I just have to review a little over 600 other potential errors.