The owner of a family tree on Ancestry can invite people to participate in researching their family history (see "Sharing a Family Tree"). The invited person will then receive an e-mail from Ancestry which contains a link to the shared tree. If they do not have an Ancestry account they will be asked to register for a free account and the tree will be associated with this new account. Users with an existing Ancestry account will have the shared tree added to their list of available trees. For more details see "Accepting Ancestry Tree Invitations" at Ancestry.
When registering for an Ancestry account, be aware that Ancestry can generate a lot of e-mail. So keep an eye out for the options which let you control how much e-mail Ancestry sends you during the registration process.
Registration with Ancestry is required to allow the tree owner to control the level of access granted to the invited users. Currently Ancestry provides three levels of access:
- Guest: read-only access to the tree, living people are hidden by default
- Contributor: can add some types of content, in particular "stories" and media, living people are hidden by default
- Editor: can edit the tree, living people are visible
Access to a shared tree only requires an Ancestry account, which is free. However access to many of the databases on Ancestry requires a subscription, thus linked records from the databases may not be visible or may have limited access to users without a subscription. Given that most public libraries and archives have an institutional subscription, users who do not want to subscribe can use these institutions to see this additional information.
Getting to and Navigating the Tree
The trees available to you on Ancestry can be found through the "TREES" menu item at the top of every Ancestry page. The menu shows the names of the available trees (long names may be truncated), and a "Create & Manage Trees" option.
The Ancestry tree display can be a little confusing at first. The "Navigating a Family Tree" article in the Ancestry help, shows what all the components are, and gives an overview of how they are used.
Setting The Home Individual on an Ancestry Tree
Typically the owner of the tree will be the default "home individual" for the tree. This is the individual that you can always jump back to by using the home icon in the tree view. You can set your "home individual" for a tree by:
- Go to the "Tree Settings"
- Select "Create & Manage Trees" option in the "TREES" menu
- Select "TREES SHARED WITH ME"
- Click the "More info" link for the tree for which you want to modify the settings (on the right of the table)
- In the right-hand bar there is a "Your home person in this tree" with a option to "change" or "choose" the home individual
Once this option has been set the home icon on the tree view will change the view to one centred on your chosen "home individual".
Setting Who You Are in the Tree
The relationship description which appears on individual's profiles (e.g. grandfather, cousin, etc.) are relative to the selected "Who you are in this tree". By default this option is not set, and the relationship description does not appear. Since it is useful to have these relationships appear relative to your own node in the tree you can set your "Who you are in this tree" for a tree by:
- Go to the "Tree Settings"
- Select "Create & Manage Trees" option in the "TREES" menu
- Select "TREES SHARED WITH ME"
- Click the "More info" link for the tree for which you want to modify the settings (on the right of the table)
- In the right-hand bar there is a "Who you are in this tree" with a option to "change" or "choose" the home individual
Once this option has been set, the relationship description will appear on individual's profiles will be relative to your chosen "you".
E-mail Controls
If Ancestry is sending you too much e-mail, you can adjust the volume using the e-mail controls. These can be accessed via the "Email Preferences" item in the account drop-down menu (top right, labelled with your account name). The main part of the "Email Preferences" page lets you control informational and marketing communications from Ancestry (free users will likely want to disable most, if not all, of these). As well as these e-mails Ancestry also sends e-mails related to the trees available to your user account. These are controlled via the "My Alerts" option (at right hand side of the "Email Preferences" page).
The controls for "My Alerts" are per-tree, and are accessed using the corresponding "Change delivery options" widget for the tree of interest. Here you can choose to disable or control the frequency (e.g. daily, weekly or monthly) of the e-mails informing you about changes to the tree.
Adding Living People
Ancestry (and many other genealogy sites) protect the privacy of living individuals by hiding their information by default. Users need to be given explicit permission to access the details of living individuals. In order to allow for description of individuals for whom a death date has not been determined, Ancestry has a separate "Status" indication with values of "Deceased" or "Living". When adding an individual the status of this flag will influence what others see in the tree. So if the individual is living or is possibly living make sure the "Status" is set to "Living". Conversely if the individual is known to be deceased or was born sufficiently long ago that they are very likely to be deceased, set the "Status" flag to "Deceased" so more users can see the individual and increase the chance of Ancestry being able to find hints from other family trees on Ancestry.
Access on Mobile Devices
Ancestry provides apps for iOS (iPhone and iPad) and Android (Google Play and Amazon Appstore) devices that you may find useful as an alternative to the website when using a mobile phone or tablet.
There is also an Ancestry Windows app, however this does not provide a tree view. The lack of tree view makes it only useful as a means to look up details about specific individuals without the overview of relationships provided by the tree.
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