Improve the Number and Type of Research Hints You Receive
Dear Team,
Recently, I had about 24 research hints that I was working on processing. About halfway through, I received another 261 research hints for people that married my 3rd-4th cousins once & twice removed. I don't follow these distant cousins but focus instead on my direct ancestors and relatives.
My question is this: Can these hints be directed to those members who are more closely related to the person mentioned in the Research Hint? This would help spread the work around and not place it all on one person. I know clearing out and processing research hints is not obligatory, however, I like to regularly do this kind of "Housekeeping" work to keep my acount neat and tidy. Just knowing that there are now over 300 research hints to go through for people I'm not interested in is overwhelming. Even dismissing these hints requires opening each one up, looking at it and making a decision on whether it's relevant or not. This takes a lot of time and at my age (72), I'd like to focus more on doing actual research. Additionally, many of these research hints present duplicate records that in many cases, are already attached to the tree. Can this be avoided? I want to make the best use of my time and not get mired down in doing all this maintenance work. Your thoughts?
Answers
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Research Hints are just a list of record hints on profiles that FS thinks you're connected to. If you don't attach them, someone else eventually probably will: the hint's presence on or absence from your homepage makes absolutely no difference to what shows on someone else's home page, or on the profile itself (both on the detail page, and in the various tree views with the appropriate settings).
If you prefer to work on just your direct ancestors, I suggest you ignore the list on your home page and use the fan chart instead. Set it to seven generations and Research Helps, and any ancestors with possible record matches will turn blue.
Both the descendancy and pedigree views can also show record hints, so you can work on relatives other than ancestors if you prefer. (Note that in the descendancy view, it's best to open each profile in a new tab, so that you don't lose your place in the chart.)
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My question is this: Can these hints be directed to those members who are more closely related to the person mentioned in the Research Hint? This would help spread the work around and not place it all on one person.
They are. All the hints you see are also in the lists of hints for potentially a few hundred other people.
Depending how active your 1st through 10th cousins are in Family Tree, you could just ignore all the hints then go back in a month or so and find all of them gone because they were taken care of by others in your family.
This aspect of the collaborative nature of Family Tree is one of the distinct advantage of the site. My tree on My Heritage currently has 63,676 hints and not a single one of them will ever go away unless I personally take care of it. Which I'm not planning on doing.
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@Gordon Collett The count on my primary tree on Ancestry is currently just a smidge under 20K. And, with the way the system works, if I start working on reducing that number, it will just grow. I'm not planning on doing that.
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My experience of FS Hints mirrors Cousin Gumbo Gurl's--my list went from a manageable 20+ to 400 overnight. I believe Dev must've tweaked the code/database somehow. MY enhancement request would be to have some way (like Ancestry) of "dismissing" items from the primary Hints list--not deleting them altogether but creating a separate Web page/database table/state that would include hints in a dismissed state. Much tidier. Just sayin'. Happy Holidays, gang--Georgia.
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@Georgia Cotrell, I doubt developers had anything to do with your new hints: a new batch of index entries probably just got published (and/or fed to the hinting engine). Either that, or you went below the home page list's threshold, so it expanded the "search radius". Or both.
I ignore the entire home page wholesale, so I have no idea how the hints list works on it, but I believe you can dismiss things from it, at least temporarily.
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You can also close the box and ignore it. I only have 42 FWIW.
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