Potential Parents on Ancestry.com

[rp76226]

Quite often recently, When looking at a particular individual who has no parents on my family tree, Ancestry.com puts in "Potential" parent names and sometimes dates of birth and death in the empty spaces that I have on my tree for that person's parents. Also, Ancestry.com sometimes does the same thing for missing spouses. Yet, no "hints" are given for me to check out when giving those potential additions to my family tree. Therefore, how am I supposed to make an accurate decision? They do mention that the names came from another family tree, but there seems to be no way to view that given tree to find out how they came up with those names. They should be giving me a family tree hint instead, especially since most of these people have been deceased for a long time. Even for "private" trees, ancestry.com allows you to see deceased people hints from that tree in other situations.

Ron

[MarcuccioV]

It's most likely a private tree situation. I get the same types of "hints", but it always tells me where they come from -- Many times it's only due to a similar name, but you can usually weed out the obvious ones based on where they hail from as opposed to others from the same surname line. I had one recently that looked suspect to me and with a little research I found that it was in fact a similar name/birthdate (it WAS an unusual name, I admit) and was therefore mis-applied. I realize it can be a slippery slope sometimes, but common sense goes a long way. Try to verify in any way possible if it looks doubtful...

[rp76226]

It is my understanding that even for private trees, Ancestry.com allows you to see deceased people through hints, especially Family Tree hints. I see that all the time on family tree hint reviews. names of deceased relatives are shown, but living people are designated as private with no name shown. Many of these hints are for people who lived when civil records were not kept.