Ancestry Shaky Leaf Hints Just a Gimmick.

[AndrewA]

After several months of not bothering with the suggested hints on ancestry, I have accumulated several hundred of these little "gems" of information, having just wasted some time checking most of these hints, all of which returned seemingly random and pointless records some which only matched the surname and nothing else, I can concluded this part of the service is utterly useless. Yes I did have a few records returned early on when I first subscribed, but to be honest the records returned were nothing special and documents which could easily be found with a few mins of searching.

I have come to conclusion that the shaking leaf is just a sales gimmick to impress potential customers, yet again giving impression that all they need to do is enter a name and the searches will do all the hard work and provide dozens of new records and people, to add at the click or two of a mouse. Maybe this is one of reasons why many peoples trees on ancestry are riddled with mistakes.

I notice how much time ancestry devote to this facility, even having a dedicated talk on it at the recent Who Do You THink You are event. Maybe delusion is clouding judgement as to how good this really is?

[MarkCDodd]

It is useful if you use it correctly.

I have 21766 hints for 7990 individuals at the moment!

I have 14,000 people in the tree so the hints are only shown for 57% which means they are not random.

If I wish to tackle them I will go to Tree Pages then All Hints

You can then select the category of hint and search names that have that type of hint.

Stories and Photos are great to search through and I have found tons of useful items amongst those.

Family Tree hints are also useful but I tend to only check those listed in the Member Connect.

Member Connect allows you to check out tree matches much quicker than using the hints.

So as a long time user of Ancestry I would disagree with you.

The hints are not random and the matching algorithms are much better than those provided by Find My Past and infinitely better than Genes Reunited.

[AndrewA]

Oh well, I guess one day I will find something useful, but so far it really has been waste of time.