What problem does Index Ancestry Family Tree in Quick Search solve?
Quick Search can jump to record collections, DNA tests and people across genealogy sites, but out of the box it does not know about the people in your own Ancestry family trees, and any list you build goes stale the moment you edit the tree. Index Ancestry Family Tree in Quick Search adds every person in a tree to Quick Search and then keeps that list current on its own.
How does Index Ancestry Family Tree in Quick Search work?
A button is added to the list of all people page for your family trees labelled Index People. Clicking this button will index all the people in the tree, allowing you to open their profiles by typing their name into the Quick Search box. Once indexed, the tree keeps itself up to date, checking for changes about every six hours.
The Index People button sits at the top of the list of all people page, next to a label showing how many people are indexed for that tree. Clicking it reads the whole tree in one pass while a progress overlay counts the people read. A tree of a few thousand people takes about a minute, and Cancel stops the run without changing what was indexed before. When it finishes, the label shows the new count and the button becomes Reindex. Every indexed person then appears as a result in Quick Search, with the tree name in a coloured pill when you have more than one tree.
From then on the tree looks after itself. About every six hours, whether or not you have Ancestry open, Quick Search checks whether the tree has changed and fetches only the people who were added, edited or removed, so you never need to click Reindex after editing your tree. You can also add a tree without visiting it: tick it under Trees in the Quick Search settings and it is fetched right away. Very large trees (over 20,000 people) are read across several checks the first time; uploading the tree’s GEDCOM file instead adds it in one go, and only the changes made since the export are fetched afterwards. Up to 10 trees can be added.
How do I use Index Ancestry Family Tree in Quick Search?
- Ensure Index Ancestry Family Tree in Quick Search is enabled in the Genealogy Assistant pop-up panel.
- Open the tree’s List of all people page on Ancestry.
- Click Index People. The progress overlay counts the people read, and you can stop at any time with Cancel.
- Open Quick Search with
Alt+Q(orOption+Qon a Mac) and start typing a name to find people in this tree. - Edit your tree as usual. Changes are picked up on their own about every six hours, or right away when you click Check now in the settings. To see when the tree was last checked, open the Quick Search settings from the Settings link in the prompt or the Quick Search section of the Advanced Settings page.
- Click Reindex if you ever want the whole tree read again from scratch.
- To remove the tree from Quick Search, untick it under Added to Quick Search in the Quick Search settings.
Index Ancestry Family Tree in Quick Search 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