I have 2 trees. One for people who I have verified and one for people who I am testing / thinking about (mostly from relatives who are also doing trees and don't agree - I test all options and then only put in the information that I have verified).

I totally agree, never accept anyone else's tree as being correct without doing due diligence on it before adding anyone. Hints are based off other people's trees as well so caution needs to be taken these as well. I would love to know your thoughts on what to do if even after doing checks you can't be certain (maybe there's not enough detail in the records to say for sure it's correct) and what if it has a DNA link to back it up (Thrulines), evidence as well right? I know if you add something and it's the same as many other people it'll suggest that record to anyone else who adds that person to their tree with the same but if you think it's right but you can't be 100% sure what do you do then?

I use only the sources attached to other trees if I think they really support my tree.

Thank you Aimee. But why is it when I am working in my tree, and I see a potential ancestor. When I click on that ancestor to see who they are and see if it is my person, it now says that ancestor is in someone else’s tree and now I have to pay to see that ancestor. Before it would show you that ancestor and you could message the person who shared that ancestor as well. I have tried an ancestory group and they said I mst be looking at someone else’s tree. How can I when it is my tree, not a collaborative tree. I am so confused.

How to download my DNA results ❓Thank you

Great advice! I cringe when I find someone’s tree and it is obvious they didn’t do the research on the person I am looking at.

Thank you for the advice switching from active to inactive

I changed my Ancestry so ancestry trees do not show up under my hints.

I love the way she documented the journals. I can do that with my great grandfathers writings that I started transcribing in Word but was too overwhelming and stopped. Thank you for this.

I didn't know that about the inactive/active...good tip!!! 4 of my husband's 3xggp's I have physical copies of descendants trees. It was easier to copy that info from another tree than manually type it all. I know bad. That was 25 years ago. On other branches I had copied I ended up with a tangled mess and ended up deleting a lot and starting over. I still like looking at other trees, and in my case have been very helpful (non-American), but there are a lot of bad ones out there.

It's okay to look at other trees but take it with a grain of salt unless there is solid information to back it up. When I first started genealogy over 10 years ago I assumed everyone probably knew what they were doing. That was a big mistake! Later on it caused me to do a lot of deleting and corrections. It also caused me to run into a lot of self inflicted brick walls. If you have a public tree Ancestry has added a feature to let you know who is looking at your tree. If you are peaking at my public tree I now know who the snoopy people are that are looking at it.

I never copy other people's trees because I find a lot of errors. I have to do my own research too many people are too lazy to research. I admit there are a couple of mistakes on mine because depending on the website I don't know how to correct my tree. I have very limited skills and I am still learning as I go. Some knowledge I know is because I knew my relatives before they passed. Some later census have my pateral grandfather born in Kentucky but that is incorrect he was born in Tennessee. I know this because my father told me many times and my mother wrote it in our family history book. There's an early census that tells his correct birth place. Another problem that came up is that many years ago the courthouse in my fathers birth town burned down and an unknown person took it upon theirself to go there and add all of my father's siblings names on the paperwork. Needless to say almost all of the information is incorrect sadly. Sometimes it pays to speak to relatives if possible but I'm pretty sure that the younger generation doesn't know. That's why its important for the elder generation to document everything they know. Take everything with a grain of salt!

When I first started using Ancestry I didn't realize that many people accept info from Family Search, info which is often not backed up by any sources. Years later, I'm still cleaning up the mess that made and I'm afraid others may have copied it from me! I no longer enter anything unsourced. But.... Maybe you could do a video on removing and starting over?

Between Ancestry and to her trees, and Family Search. Review the details, to see if similar to what I know and compare and make notes to review the back up. Hence using the member connect and seeing what they have, most may already be in my tree, but they may have another source i didn't have but reviewing it I agree. If you look up and down (if possible) on the other tree and see if they have others that I agree with.

Great tips. Here are some ways I "screen" peoples trees when I "peek" -if someone has a large tree 10,000 -40,000 people, they most likely are just copying from other trees. I usually don't look at the tree. -If the tree doesn't have sources, I usually don't look at it long. -I will often look at the home person in the tree. If there is a direct ancestor with family photos and family document photos, I will take a closer look, I may have found some interesting family history. -I will check for DNA matches with the person's tree. This might be a long lost cousin with family information -I wil often add the person to my tree and then hunt for sources that verify the person -but I leave myself enough time in one sitting to delete the person if it doesn't pan out. Once in awhile I will leave myself a comment that I am unable to verify the person (but I want to continue the search later). I try not to do this very often because it can be easy to forget you did this.

Perfect advice, Aimee. I have to admit that I'm guilty of copying a person from another tree, and not always just one. 🤭That was also way back before I even knew better. But now I do, so now I don't 😆

As somebody who's adopted, looking at other people's trees can actually help. But I don't tend to add people to mine unless I've got paperwork to back it up. Like my biological paternal second great grandfather, ancestry is making suggestions on who could be his father, but there's no paper trail to prove that he was anywhere near the state of Pennsylvania which was where my second great grandfather was actually born. We don't know what city in Pennsylvania because there are no records with any cities listed just that he was born in Pennsylvania. His name is extremely common so you know it's kind of hard to find a match. I've actually found like six or seven David foxes that were born about the time of my second great-grandfather in Pennsylvania. I know that my second great grandfather is who he is because I ran both his last name and his wife's last name in my DNA matches and I came up with paternal matches that go back to both. The trees I'm most likely to peek at are going to be the ones that are tied to my DNA matches.

Great Tip....

Blessing aimee ❤

If you go back far enough it gets pretty bizarre.

Ive had a subscription to Ancestry in the past but now I'm working with this free resource. Thank you for the how to!!

Glad you, your family, home and precious memories are not gone. I always pray for the people when the natural disasters happen, and cry when I see the devastation. I live in the northwest Florida gulf coast. We have the hurricanes and our town that I live in was devistated by Hurricane Opal in 1995. Thank you for sharing your feelings with us.

Aimee, are you sure you aren’t part African? Because before you even spoke about African ancestry I thought you are part African. If you took a picture, scan it into your computer made your skin dark and your hair dark brown you would look like many black women I’ve see in public.

My mothers father was born out of wedlock. There is no birth certificate available. How would I go about finding who his biological father. A very well kept secret. He was born in 1906 but doesn't show up in any census until 1920. He was raised with his mothers family as a sibling. He had two aunts around his age. His mother married when he was 6 and he took the last name of the man she married. Help.

Thank you for all the information. It will be very useful! If I had seen this video before, I wouldn't have spent so much time searching :)

Hi Aimee, we had some family mysteries. My grandma's mother was unwed and never knew who her bio. father was. Also, my husband's grandpa ran away from home at 14, and he never would speak about his previous life. We did not even know the names of his parents or siblings. So we took a DNA test to find out what we had come from. My husband only has one uncle left that is very excited about all we found, and I'm wanting to quickly make a book with a hardcover for him. (He is 82.) Are any of these options hardcover? I love all these ideas. It turns out that my great-grandfather was a bigtime bank robber in 1934. He was known for his machine gun and tuxedo during his robberies, but no one ever got killed. :) Since working on this, I am so interested in genealogy!

Great video. Will try this out. Thanks Aimee!

I’m grateful that you and your family are safe. I met you at BCG in Richmond VA 2 years ago and you were so sweet and kind. God bless you for sharing love with us and for helping your neighbors. Your prayer is my prayer. And yes, I have to figure out a way to digitize my photo and document collection. It’s so huge it’s overwhelming but that’s no excuse. Thank you and God bless!

I am so sorry about your neighborhood. What a difficult time for those who lost so much. Grateful that you, your family and home are safe ♥ Thank you for all that you do!

Hello, is there anyway I can reach out to you regarding brick walls.

How do I change my race, Heritage, color on my birthday certificate ? Please 🙏

Just checking in on you to make sure you are ok? I've been through a fire, it takes time to recover. Be kind to yourself. 💙

One of my lines goes back to the Mayflower, but I cannot remember which one, randomly clicking on ancestors did not help Is there an easy/good way to find the correct line that gets me back to the Mayflower?

Good info.

The pages of the Book of Revelation are slowly being turned around the world. We must repent.

Thank you so much Aimee. You are wonderful.

🙏🙏🙏

My heart is with you. Happy that your home was spared but, collectively, for your neighborhood, how devastating. Yes, take measures to protect important things, but this is your life space. Take care and may God be in the aftermath as you reconstruct your neighborhood. ❤

Our last census was NOT completed and is useless, or will be when its available.

But affording to purchase all the documentation is impossible for the average citizen.

My heart broke when I heard about this fire, living in San Diego. Years ago we went thru this same thing. We too were safe. I'm praying for these people who lost their homes will be able to rebuild. So glad you were safe. Do they know if it was purposely set, or just nature?

How do I organize a way that I can associate names, people and places with digital photos? Where to save that metadata? How to use the metadata once its associated with a photo? I would like to have a way to look up a photo by names of people, and have the ability to organize pics with multiple people in it. also known places.

Thankful you and your family are safe.