Issue 46.16
Part 2
Hope Chest software is a tree analyzing software that works with FamilySearch Family Tree. It will save hours of time clicking through your tree so that you can find what you are looking for without all the tedious effort. It cannot update information into your FamilySearch Account and it can support LDS features to find temple work.
“Record Hints” is another feature of Hope Chest. You can go to Hope Chest Settings and have it search for your ancestors that have Record Hints attached to them that need to be verified and added. These Record Hints are powered by FamilySearch Indexing and they are added frequently so this Record Hints feature is a good way to try to keep adding the new sources to your ancestors. I love the record hints feature because I find new information, family relationships not already in Family Tree, and data that either solidifies a relationship or disproves it. This also helps me find duplicates because you may have a record hint on your ancestor and find that it is already attached to another person with the same name. Then you can review and see if they need to be merged, and frequently they do. Record Hints also helps you fill in information on an ancestor which helps the Possible Duplicates feature of Family Tree work better. The more information we have on our ancestors to uniquely identify them from the rest of the world, the better!
“Research Suggestions” is another setting in Hope Chest. This setting will search through your tree looking for individuals with the purple icon of Research Suggestions. Research Suggestions alerts are generated by deficiencies in information. Examples of these are: couple has less than three children, couple may have children, missing birth or death years, no sources attached, person may have a spouse and possible missing child, among others. This is an awesome use of Hope Chest because it will help you find things that need to be fixed and researched in Family Tree.
“Data Problems” is the last status setting in Hope Chest that you can select. This will alert you to any of your ancestors that have Data Problems. This is another wonderful use of Hope Chest so that you can find your ancestors who were born after their father died, born before their mother’s child bearing years, born after their spouse died and even some who died before they were born. There is a whole list of problems that Data Problems will bring to your attention and they all need to be fixed or dismissed. These are some of the errors in Family Tree that we need to fix in our own families.
More on the proper use of Hope Chest next week.