The Ancestry website has a flexible (personalised) front page, where you can arrange or hide various modules showing particular information. I have chosen to have ‘Recent Member Connect Activity’ as the the top left box, which I find a bit addictive. It highlights activity by other Ancestry members connected with records which are on your own tree (or the ‘shoebox’ save-for-later area). There’s something new every week, often most days, usually just showing you who else has some vague interest in a particular person in the tree, saving a census or birth record say, as its easy to do. This can be a bit of a time waster when the same fellow researchers re-appear, or the link is tenuous. Or occasionally good for a laugh when they have got things obviously wrong. But it can come up trumps, as it did twice this weekend.

Continue reading In praise of .. Ancestry’s Member Connect Activity feature