Trace Your Family Tree

How Ancestry and other family members can help you build your family tree

When building your family tree with Ancestry.co.uk you won't be on your own. To get the most out of building your family tree look you can easily call on help from other relatives as well as other Ancestry Members. They'll be able to provide you with the benefit of their wealth of knowledge, experience and information, which you'll be able to tap into.

Let's start by taking a look at getting other family members involved.

Involving other family members

Getting other family members involved is easy and you can decide at what point you'd like their involvement or assistance. If it's before you start building your tree, Ancestry can provide you with a range of charts to help you capture key information regarding your ancestors, such as names, places and dates for you to enter into your Ancestry family tree at a later date. Why not take a look at the type of form and chart templates we provide now?

You can also invite them to view your Ancestry family tree at any time. Read on to find out more about how to go about this.

Inviting others to view your tree

Inviting others to view your tree saved on Ancestry is easy and is a great way of generating interest and involvement from other family members. It will also help to make the process of building your family tree as valuable and interesting as possible for you and all those others involved.

Not only can you control who gets to see your tree and when, but you can also determine what level of access to your tree you'd like to grant them too. This can be changed at any time by sending an updated invite to another family member's email box. Invitations are all via email, enabling you to personalise the message you may wish to send to a family member. For example, "Dear Aunt Ida, can you provide any details of my great grand-mother's house? Or "Dear Uncle Frank, can you date this photo attached to Uncle John in my family tree?"

There are three levels of access you'll be able to assign to an invitee to your tree:

• Guest - means that your invitee will be able to view your family tree but not make any changes. This is particularly useful when you're starting out and looking to get initial help and assistance from other relatives.
• Contributor - means that they'll be able to add information to ancestors already identified in your tree
• Editor - assigning editor rights will give them access to add, amend any of the contents of your family tree. You can also control, at any of the three levels, whether an invitee can view living relatives within your tree or not through a simple tick box.

Simply look for the Invitation links and buttons located at the various points in your family tree views.

Using other Ancestry Members

You can also enlist the help of other Ancestry members to both help you build your family tree as well as get great first-hand tips from their collective wealth of personal experience from their own family tree building exploits.

Firstly, you can invite other Ancestry Members at any time to view your family tree using the Invitation process highlighted in the previous section. You can invite other Ancestry members by simply using their Ancestry User name.

Posting a message on one or more of numerous message boards within the free to use Ancestry Community section is also a great way of accessing the help of Ancestry members. If it's family history related, you'll be almost certain to find a Message Board with active message posters and respondents behind it to help you in your research. Whether it be getting tips on how to go about searching Parish Records for example, to looking to trace the De Villiers family line in South Africa, the range of topics covered here are almost infinite.

You can also find out more about how to use the Ancestry Community section of the Ancestry.co.uk website through our short online tutorial, presented by the popular historian and TV personality, Tony Robinson. Start watching now »