I retrieved docs, pictures etc. from my family home (like, literally carrying them away in a plastic bag because I didn't want to risk them going lost, destroyed etc.). My sibling doesn't care about it, but they do have one kid (who may at some point want to learn/remember more stuff about their grandparents) and I would love for them to simply have this stuff some day, organized in a way that doesn't make them feel like it's all junk and should be just thrown away. (As an example of what I currently have, there's a diploma of one of my parents, papers from the other one when they were working abroad, wedding restaurant menus, drawings and Christmas wishes from when we were children, etc. If it were all photos it'd be relatively easy to just put everything in albums, but it's not the case). I realize that even just looking at this stuff is not easy for me, and I absolutely don't want to turn this into a family history project (I don't plan to do a family tree for instance, but I am intrigued by the idea of somehow putting all this stuff in some timeline of sort). I just don't know how to go about it. Do I just digitize everything? Has anybody built some kind of "memory box" or something that I can look at to get some inspiration? Please let me know if I can help clarify my request. Thanks for reading...

One side of my tree is heavily Anabaptist. Mostly Mennonites and some Church of the Brethren. Possibly a little bit of amish.

What does it mean if it says the family is reformed? For example- Nickolas Joder married so and so...His family was reformed.

What does that mean? Ive googled but I'm still confused.

I know where they're from, but I'm curious if you can guess based on their looks.

The first picture shows my great-grandparents with my grandpa's siblings, and the second picture is my grandpa.

I've been thinking about taking a DNA test to learn more about my biological family. I was adopted as a baby and although I have the names of my biological parents to go on, I don't know a lot about their families or whether I have any other biological siblings. I'm hoping I will be able to find some matches that can tell me a little bit more about my relatives, but I'm not sure how accurate that is.

Has anyone here used DNA testing to find biological relatives? How useful were the results? Did you manage to connect with family members, or did it take a lot of extra research to figure out the matches?

Hi! My great-grandmother Gladys was adopted, and so I am trying to track down her birth mother for my research. This is what I know.

Her daughter was born on Oct 27th, 1900, in Eastbourne, Sussex.

She was adopted by William and Maud Whitmore, who took in another nurse child, "William Button," around the same time. Gladys remained with them throughout her childhood, but William Button was gone before 1911. According to a letter from Gladys's future husband, her adopted family didn't want anything to do with her.

Her name was Emma Laxton (as per Gladys's birth certificate and baptism record)

Emma was listed as "Mother's helper." on Gladys's birth certificate. She was listed as "single woman" on her baptism record.

She gave birth at the address 27 Winter Road, which was a private residence where a plumber named David Jeffrey and his wife were likely living.

Emma's address was "19 Grand Parade," which was a lodging home. The newspaper listed the guests at the address the day before Gladys's birth and six days afterwards. Emma was not listed, but these names were on both lists: Mr and Mrs Coke, Mr and Mrs Desborough, Miss A. Desborough, Miss Foster.

My current theory is that Emma may have been a governess (aka Mothers helper) for one of the families listed. I've checked the 1901 and 1891 censuses, and there's no Emma Laxton living with families by those names. Is there any other way to research servants and the families they lived for in England at this time? Does anyone have any advice for me and my research?

I noticed a TikTok content creator (Brodie Falgoust / @brodieshredz) from South Louisiana with the last name Falgoust. I know Louisiana family history is a blend of different French-speaking groups. Did the Falgoust family arrive via the Acadian expulsion (making it a classic Cajun surname), or was it a direct immigration from France to French colonial Louisiana?

This morning I saved two hints to my ancestor's granddaughter's profile - both were school yearbook hints with photos. The last time I used Ancestry regularly (some 6-9 months ago), if you saved multiple instances of school yearbook photos, they were all in that profile's gallery and you could choose which one to use as the profile's main photo. No longer. Only the first one I saved was available.

Much the same thing happened with another person in my tree. I saved a number of photo hints for this lady which had been submitted by another of her descendants. None of them are available in her gallery on my tree, though one does show as her profile photo (but does not show in the gallery).

I've been off and on with Ancestry, but I've used the platform for over a decade. I've saved photos, stories and articles ~countless~ times successfully over the years, following the same steps I did this morning. This has never happened before today. Does anyone know if Ancestry changed anything recently, or if there's another step I now need to add? Thank you all!

Mehmed* ćosić my mistake

Chekc it out.

My family left Europe, arrived at a mid-sized city in a Northeastern state and stayed. We’re at seven generations in and around this city now.

I often open Ancestry on my phone when I have a few minutes free and search for clues for one of these sedentary ancestors. The first results are pages and pages of City Directory listings, every year for the same person on the same street for decades.

I can’t see any way to filter out City Directory listings only. I’d like to see all the rest — BMD, photos, other family trees, etc. — rather than specify one category at a time. But I cannot scroll through dozens of pages of the same City Directory listings for every person before getting to any other records.

Is there a solution? Thank you for any ideas!

Ancestry only prints the part of the tree you can see on screen, so I'm building something for that.

You export your tree as a GEDCOM (click the tree name, then Tree Settings, then Export tree) and load it in your browser, and it'll lay out everyone in it as one poster PDF you can take to a print shop. The plan is that your file never leaves your computer.

If you want something free right now, Gramps can draw everyone with its Graph View addon, and Complete Family Tree Viewer and Topola work in the browser. Most of them start from one person though, or get hard to read once the tree is big. Family Tree Builder has an all-in-one chart but it's on the paid plan.

It's not out yet. There'll be a free preview with a watermark and the full-size file will be paid.

If you want to hear when it's ready, the waitlist is at https://wholetreepress.com

It makes no sense; most or all nobility that I can find in Western Europe are eurasian at the most. Mytrueancestry is listing Robert Dudley as a very-AsianO1a1a1b1b. Most other sources say that he is a more-logical R1b. Any ideas?

Is this an official forum?

It’s almost impossible to get actual customer service from Ancestry. Some semi-anonymous chatter (are they all bots) says it has raised a ticket and gives you a number, but denies that there’s any way of tracking the number and says they definitely won’t contact you.

Apparently you can just randomly check the site yourself to see if something gets fixed.

This is the most insane bug tracking I have every seen! Or is it all a joke?

Been doing Ancestry for nearly a decade and I love the new update they pushed out - my results are more accurate and labeled correctly thankfully now ( rather than putting my indigenous origins as Mexico / Mexican, yes - there's a difference) - I love the stickers and that you are able to download them. This is definitely one of their best updates yet. They've refined these so much over the years and they have improved on accuracy, as I have all the records to prove my origins, rather than their DNA estimations.

my region stickers - https://i.imgur.com/Ft9vBMR.png

Is anyone else having problems connecting to Ancestry.co.uk? Is there scheduled downtime I've missed the warning for? Photo is the result I get for any Ancestry pages I try to open.