Do you have an online tree? Ancestry.com <www.ancestry.com> is a useful tool for researching and sharing your family history, making it a great place to take the leap. Or maybe you’ve been using Ancestry.com’s trees for years, but your tree is looking more and more like a bush.
Taking time to master Ancestry.com can help you grow your tree into something that will interest even the non-genealogists in your family. Here are some of the site’s most-important family tree features, and how you can best use them.
THE BASICS OF ANCESTRY.COM TREES
You build and maintain your own family tree on Ancestry.com, in contrast to the “one-tree” models of websites like FamilySearch <www.familysearch.org>. Privacy settings allow you to decide who can see your tree: any Ancestry.com user, only selected users, or no one but you. You can attach records, photos and other media to your tree. You can even attach DNA results if you’ve tested with AncestryDNA <www.ancestry.com/dna>.
Anyone can create a tree on Ancestry.com; you just need a free account. A paid subscription allows you to view Ancestry.com’s massive collection of records and attach them to your tree, but those features aren’t necessary to get started.
There’s not a limit to how many trees you can make. You could maintain separate trees for your maternal and paternal lines, for example, or
