Sort 'Hints' by surname

Lynda Cook_2

I have been working one trying to clear up a large number of hints I have not been able to get to for several months. These hints are very helpful, but I find that I will get a hint for an individual and work it off, then go on to the next hint and get thru several pages of hints, then all of a sudden the individual I worked with prior pops up again. This becomes frustrating and eats up a lot of time. If all surnames were sorted together, one could work off all for a family at one time.

Thanks

Alan E. Brown

FamilySearch will try to make sure you have hints available. It sounds like you think there is a manageable list of hints and if you are sufficiently diligent, you'll be able to "clear up" that list of hints. That's not how it works. FamilySearch will search back some number of generations (perhaps back 5 and down 1) and give you a list of hints. If you manage to reduce the list of hints that have been given to you, then the hinting list will go back another generation or down another generation and you will suddenly have a lot more hints. It's unlikely that you will ever succeed in clearing up your hint list.

So I would recommend that you work on hints whenever you would like to, but you should abandon any hope of clearing up your list. And given the dynamic nature of these hint lists, it probably wouldn't be very helpful to sort them by surname.

Áine Ní Donnghaile

The more hints you process, the more hints you will have. Ancestry finally quit putting a number on the hints leaf because it was always out of date and it was driving people who tried to reduce it to zero a bit batty.

Tiffany Farnsworth Nash

To avoid hints popping back up for the same person be sure that you are removing an erroneous Residences as well.