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Add Keyboard Shortcuts to Family Tree

What problem does Add Keyboard Shortcuts to Family Tree solve?

Moving around an Ancestry family tree is a mouse-heavy job. Every action, whether that is opening the edit panel, hiding siblings, jumping to family view, or checking hints, means hovering, clicking a menu, and clicking an option. Add Keyboard Shortcuts to Family Tree lets you do all of those things with a single keystroke while your cursor is over a person on the tree.

How does Add Keyboard Shortcuts to Family Tree work?

When you’re on an Ancestry family tree page, pressing any of the shortcut keys listed below triggers the matching action on the person your mouse is hovering over. Several keys act on the tree as a whole, so they work no matter where the cursor is. Middle-clicking a person opens their profile card in a new tab so you can keep the tree view open. In the horizontal view this also works on the names listed under Spouse & Children and Siblings beneath the focus person, where a normal click would move the focus to that person instead.

In the horizontal view, Ancestry only lists the spouse, children and siblings of the focus person. Hovering over any other person shows a small relatives badge at the bottom right corner of their card. Clicking it, or pressing R while hovering, opens a Relatives panel beneath that person with the same Spouse & Children and Siblings lists, including birth and death years. Each name is a link, so a click or middle-click opens that person’s profile in a new tab. The panel closes when you click away from it, scroll, or press Escape.

Clicking a person on the tree opens their card. On trees that do not include a Search button, such as public trees belonging to other members, one is added for you, so you can search Ancestry records for anyone in any tree you view.

The card also shows how old the person was when they died, at the end of the death line. Where the tree records a full date for both the birth and the death, the age is exact. Where only a year is recorded the age is given as a range, such as 91 to 92, because the months are unknown. A person who is still living shows their age today instead, and a person whose death date has not been recorded shows no age at all.

Hovering over the Search button on any tree opens an Advanced Search menu, which searches that person on eight genealogy websites: Ancestry, FamilySearch records, FamilySearch trees, FindMyPast, MyHeritage, WikiTree, FindAGrave and Newspapers.com. Each site has a checkbox so you can choose which ones to include, and Search selected opens every ticked site at once. Your choices are remembered and shared with the same menu on profile pages. The menu stays open until you click away from it or press Escape.

How do I use Add Keyboard Shortcuts to Family Tree?
  • Ensure Add Keyboard Shortcuts to Family Tree is enabled in the Genealogy Assistant pop-up panel.
  • Open any Ancestry family tree.
  • Hover over a person in the tree and press any of the person-specific shortcut keys below to trigger that action. The tree-wide shortcuts work from anywhere on the page.
  • Click a person to open their card. Their age at death is shown at the end of the death line. Hover over the Search button to open the Advanced Search menu. Click a site name to search that site on its own, or tick the sites you want and click Search selected to open them together.
  • To reach the same menu without opening the card, hover over a person and press A.
  • In the horizontal view, hover over a person and click the relatives badge on their card, or press R, to see their spouse, children and siblings. Click a name to open that person’s profile in a new tab.
Keyboard Shortcuts
  • E opens the Edit panel for the hovered person
  • T opens the family view for the hovered person
  • S searches Ancestry records for the hovered person, including on public trees belonging to other members
  • A opens the Advanced Search menu for the hovered person
  • R opens the Relatives panel for the hovered person (horizontal view)
  • F opens the Find Person search box
  • H hides every sibling shown in the tree (vertical view)
  • G expands the tree by one generation, upward and downward (vertical view)
  • D collapses the outermost generation of the tree (vertical view)
  • C toggles the tree cleaner view
  • P toggles the printable tree view
  • V changes the tree view layout
  • Y toggles the Y-DNA inheritance path overlay
  • M toggles the mtDNA inheritance path overlay
  • X toggles the X-DNA inheritance path overlay
  • L starts picking two people to see how they are related, or cancels picking (vertical view)
  • Escape closes the open panel or overlay
  • Middle-click a person to open their profile card in a new tab, including names in the Spouse & Children, Siblings and Relatives lists
Add Keyboard Shortcuts to Family Tree is a feature of the software Genealogy Assistant.

Genealogy Assistant is an extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari which supercharges your family history research by adding over 100 custom features to popular genealogy websites like Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, FamilyTreeDNA and more. You can watch a full video walkthrough on YouTube.

Install Genealogy Assistant for Google Chrome | Install for Mozilla Firefox | Install for Microsoft Edge | Install for Apple Safari