ORIGINALLY AUTHORED BY AARON ORR, ANCESTRY.COM
Ever wonder if there are new hints you haven’t seen hiding in your family tree? Now it’s easy to see new hints when they come your way—we’ve just released a feature to notify you when you get new hints. You may have noticed when you last visited Ancestry.com.au that the menu bar in the top-right corner of the site looks different. In addition to a new design, there’s now a leaf; a red number will appear on the leaf when you have new hints waiting for you.
From anywhere on the site you can click on the leaf in the menu bar to see a list of your new hints and review them right away or come back to them later. Clicking on an individual hint will take you to the Person Hint List to review hints for that person, and clicking on “See all recent hints” takes you to the All Hints Page to review all hints in your tree, which are listed by the most recent.
If you have several trees, but are only active on some of them, you can also set your preferences so you’re only notified about hints in the trees you’re actively working on. Hint Preferences are located on the Site Preferences page – just click on Site Preferences from the dropdown menu under your username.
Additionally, we’ve heard from some members that they are less interested in hints to other member trees than other hints, such as record hints. We want to make sure that this new feature, as well as Ancestry Hints in general, is useful to everyone. Now in Hint Preferences (found in Site Preferences) you can choose whether to display your Member Tree hints or not. This setting can remove Member Tree hints from the tree viewer, hint notifications, hint lists, hint counts, etc. Member Tree hints are still accessible, however they’ll only be found in the Member Tree view on the All Hints page (it will say “OFF”, but you can still click to see any Member Tree hints you may have). If you turn Member Tree hints back on they’ll reappear throughout the site.
We hope that these new features will help you to get the most from the hints in your family tree and make more meaningful discoveries. Let us know what you think – leave a comment below or post on our Facebook wall.