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So I subscribe to Newspapers.com which is owned by Ancestry, where my main tree is located.
Anyways, over this past summer I went crazy looking up mostly obituaries of people in my tree, probably a few hundred or so. Now with Newspapers.com you can do a couple of things, one you can just "clip" the article and link it to your Ancestry tree, probably the easiest/least amount of work.
The other thing you can do is print/save the article. If you save it to your computer, you can save it as either a JPG or PDF. I don't "clip", but rather save the article as a JPG and place it into a folder on my computer, then manual add the article to my Ancestry tree. I know it's more work, but I actually enjoy my method.
Recently, the last week or so, I have been seeing a bunch of new green hint leaves appearing on people in my tree who haven't had any green leaves for months or longer, because I already went through and vetted them all. So I click on these new hints and what are they, but a hint from Newspapers.com Obituary Index, 1800s-current.
I open the link to view the obituary, and it's the same article that I already added to people in my tree over the past 3 months or so, of course there's is the whole page with the obit specifically highlighted, where mine is just the obit. And there's a note saying: These facts were pulled from a record by a computer and may not be accurate. I guess people at Ancestry created some sort of algorithm/program that looks for people like myself, who didn't "clip" the article from Newspapers.com and link it to their tree, but manually save and upload the picture of the article to their tree.
For some reason I find it funny and quite ingenuous as well. I do have people saving my articles that I have uploaded to my tree and of course I reject these new hints and say I already have the information. Now you might be asking, how do you know for certain they used my uploaded obits in their new algorithm, well for most of these obits, I'm the only one on Ancestry that has them to start, most people, at least the ones looking at the same people in my tree, don't really care or at least not yet. Or maybe I'm just grasping at straws and they might have just used a name search to find the obit, but what a coincidence that all of a sudden AFTER I upload the obit a month later these hints appear as a Newspapers.com Obituary Index!
If this helps get more people to find good/correct records for their ancestors, I think it's a great thing, although maybe Ancestry should "throw me a bone" and give me a free subscription for helping them out!
They do that crap. Somehow they just don't connect. If you were clicking around on the person, too, the hints will reappear. They aren't new hints, they're just hints you haven't accepted or ignored.
So I subscribe to Newspapers.com which is owned by Ancestry, where my main tree is located.
Anyways, over this past summer I went crazy looking up mostly obituaries of people in my tree, probably a few hundred or so. Now with Newspapers.com you can do a couple of things, one you can just "clip" the article and link it to your Ancestry tree, probably the easiest/least amount of work.
The other thing you can do is print/save the article. If you save it to your computer, you can save it as either a JPG or PDF. I don't "clip", but rather save the article as a JPG and place it into a folder on my computer, then manual add the article to my Ancestry tree. I know it's more work, but I actually enjoy my method.
I always do the same because using the "save to Ancestry" option saves a smaller, lower resolution version of the clipping that is difficult to read.
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Now you might be asking, how do you know for certain they used my uploaded obits in their new algorithm, well for most of these obits, I'm the only one on Ancestry that has them to start, most people, at least the ones looking at the same people in my tree, don't really care or at least not yet. Or maybe I'm just grasping at straws and they might have just used a name search to find the obit, but what a coincidence that all of a sudden AFTER I upload the obit a month later these hints appear as a Newspapers.com Obituary Index!
If this helps get more people to find good/correct records for their ancestors, I think it's a great thing, although maybe Ancestry should "throw me a bone" and give me a free subscription for helping them out!
I really doubt Ancestry are using your uploaded clippings to create an index, if that's what you mean. It would be far more work for them to use images you've uploaded then it would be for them to do what they've probably done, which is merely take the OCR from all the full images at Newspapers.com and create an index for it at Ancestry.com. Using clippings people have uploaded from Newspapers.com would be inconsistent and take far more work to find them, plus it would require weeding out clippings from other sources that didn't come from Newspapers.com.
So I subscribe to Newspapers.com which is owned by Ancestry, where my main tree is located.
Anyways, over this past summer I went crazy looking up mostly obituaries of people in my tree, probably a few hundred or so. Now with Newspapers.com you can do a couple of things, one you can just "clip" the article and link it to your Ancestry tree, probably the easiest/least amount of work.
The other thing you can do is print/save the article. If you save it to your computer, you can save it as either a JPG or PDF. I don't "clip", but rather save the article as a JPG and place it into a folder on my computer, then manual add the article to my Ancestry tree. I know it's more work, but I actually enjoy my method.
Recently, the last week or so, I have been seeing a bunch of new green hint leaves appearing on people in my tree who haven't had any green leaves for months or longer, because I already went through and vetted them all. So I click on these new hints and what are they, but a hint from Newspapers.com Obituary Index, 1800s-current.
I open the link to view the obituary, and it's the same article that I already added to people in my tree over the past 3 months or so, of course there's is the whole page with the obit specifically highlighted, where mine is just the obit. And there's a note saying: These facts were pulled from a record by a computer and may not be accurate. I guess people at Ancestry created some sort of algorithm/program that looks for people like myself, who didn't "clip" the article from Newspapers.com and link it to their tree, but manually save and upload the picture of the article to their tree.
For some reason I find it funny and quite ingenuous as well. I do have people saving my articles that I have uploaded to my tree and of course I reject these new hints and say I already have the information. Now you might be asking, how do you know for certain they used my uploaded obits in their new algorithm, well for most of these obits, I'm the only one on Ancestry that has them to start, most people, at least the ones looking at the same people in my tree, don't really care or at least not yet. Or maybe I'm just grasping at straws and they might have just used a name search to find the obit, but what a coincidence that all of a sudden AFTER I upload the obit a month later these hints appear as a Newspapers.com Obituary Index!
If this helps get more people to find good/correct records for their ancestors, I think it's a great thing, although maybe Ancestry should "throw me a bone" and give me a free subscription for helping them out!
Well, whatever happened it sure looks like it was generated due to what you've done. So weird that you never got the hint until after you did what you did.
Normally with obituaries I've been adding them as notes. I haven't tried to add it as a custom fact but I'm going to try.
My Heritage keeps giving me hints to my own tree at Family Search and Wiki tree saying that tree has more complete information then my tree at my heritage lol So far Ancestry hasn't linked me to my own work yet...
I really doubt Ancestry are using your uploaded clippings to create an index, if that's what you mean. It would be far more work for them to use images you've uploaded then it would be for them to do what they've probably done, which is merely take the OCR from all the full images at Newspapers.com and create an index for it at Ancestry.com. Using clippings people have uploaded from Newspapers.com would be inconsistent and take far more work to find them, plus it would require weeding out clippings from other sources that didn't come from Newspapers.com.
Obviously when I upload and attach the obits to people in my tree, they will come up as hints for other users and it will say so-so uploaded this, do you want to accept it. I see this a lot with photos and PDFs.
I'm not an IT person, maybe you're right. I just find it odd, all of a sudden I get these Newspapers.com Obituary Index, 1800s-current hints with the These facts were pulled from a record by a computer and may not be accurate note attached. And most of these obits I attached, I'm the only one on Ancestry with that obit/attachment, that I know of.
Not being an IT person, maybe it's not that hard at all to write some script to look at obits people have uploaded manually and find where the obit was located on Newspapers.com. All of my file names I upload to Ancestry have the date and newspaper name in the title, the default when you save them from Newspapers.com.
As to your point about weeding out "bad" uploads, maybe that These facts were pulled from a record by a computer and may not be accurate note covers their butt for possible inaccuracies?
When I read that note, it just seems like "pulled from a record", means a computer (program) found an attachment (a record) someone uploaded and labeled as an obituary that came from Newspapers.com. Obviously, I'm going to stop uploading obits, I was just wondering if anyone else has had this happen to them recently?
I'm not an IT person, maybe you're right. I just find it odd, all of a sudden I get these Newspapers.com Obituary Index, 1800s-current hints with the These facts were pulled from a record by a computer and may not be accurate note attached.
Yes, they're being pulled by a computer which OCR'ed the images at Newspapers.com to begin with. In order for anyone to be able to search the newspapers at Newspapers.com, they have to be OCR'ed (Optical Character Recognition - this is when digital text is extracted from printed text scanned as an image by a computer recognizing the shape of the characters in the image). So Newspapers.com has already indexed all their images with OCR, otherwise you wouldn't be able to use the search engine there. All Ancestry.com has done is take that index and make it available at Ancestry.com.
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And most of these obits I attached, I'm the only one on Ancestry with that obit/attachment, that I know of.
Which doesn't prove anything - if they are getting their index from Newspapers.com, which they are, it doesn't matter if one, a dozen, or no one at Ancestry has already attached it to their tree, it will still be in their database.
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Not being an IT person, maybe it's not that hard at all to write some script to look at obits people have uploaded manually and find where the obit was located on Newspapers.com.
But it would be far easier and more comprehensive to just take the existing complete OCR'ed index from Newspapers.com and put it on Ancestry.com. Relying on clippings that users have added would make the database incomplete and require far more work and effort to write the script and organize the results. Why would they do that if there's already a complete version available from a company they own?
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All of my file names I upload to Ancestry have the date and newspaper name in the title, the default when you save them from Newspapers.com.
All of which is already available at Newspapers.com, a company they own, they wouldn't even need to go searching for it.
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As to your point about weeding out "bad" uploads, maybe that These facts were pulled from a record by a computer and may not be accurate note covers their butt for possible inaccuracies?
When I read that note, it just seems like "pulled from a record", means a computer (program) found an attachment (a record) someone uploaded and labeled as an obituary that came from Newspapers.com.
Obviously, I'm going to stop uploading obits, I was just wondering if anyone else has had this happen to them recently?
Well, that's going to be your loss, and for no purpose. No, I haven't noticed this. I have noticed hints from this collection popping up, but they are for a combination of ones I have already added and ones I hadn't found yet.
I just found a Newspapers.com hint for someone whose obituary I hadn't found/uploaded yet myself and as far as I can find, no one else has either. How would that be possible if they are relying on what users have uploaded?
Here's the record: https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/...ry&h=500018395 - you can search for him in trees if you want - there's 17 trees and granted, some of them are private, but all of them either have no death date at all, or have the wrong death date so they obviously haven't found and uploaded the obituary. Of course, I'm now about to add it so there's that.
just read you message about ancestry, I use the free service in my local
archive library. if I find things on ancestry I send it back to my computer
at home. find my past will only save them, If when I find any newspaper
bits they are copied on my laptop and put with the person its about.
I live Shropshire, UK.
Well, whatever happened it sure looks like it was generated due to what you've done. So weird that you never got the hint until after you did what you did.
Normally with obituaries I've been adding them as notes. I haven't tried to add it as a custom fact but I'm going to try.
My Heritage keeps giving me hints to my own tree at Family Search and Wiki tree saying that tree has more complete information then my tree at my heritage lol So far Ancestry hasn't linked me to my own work yet...
So I clicked PA2UK's link yesterday, then looked at my Ancestry page which was showing I had new hints. Guess what? My deceased sister in law had a hint, Newspapers.com Obituary Index, 1800s-current, there was another for her great great grandmother.
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ancestry and newpapers
