An Important Hint on How to Use Ancestry.com

I've been giving cousins access to the main Gov Leete tree and to their own lineage branch.  I give you this access by "sharing" the tree in Ancestry, which sends you a boilerplate email with a link to the tree.

You may be confused with what you see when you first click the link to tree.  The first thing that might be displayed is a kind of Welcome splash screen.  Just click OK or whatever the button is to close that screen.  What's left is a screen that looks like this example?

  You can navigate around using this view, but it isn't very obvious how to do it.  (Parenthetically, there are good tutorials on how to use this interface.  If you don't understand, you can ask a question by emailing me.

BUT, there is a much better view for navigating around the tree.  Look in the upper left hand corner.  See that the button labeled "Pedigree" is dark(er).  This is because this default view is called the "Pedigree" view. Note the button beside it:  the "Family" view.  Click that button and this is what you will see:

(You can left click on these pictures to make them larger.)  This is the "nice" view for exploring the family.  Note the box with the little squares in the lower left corner.  If you click on the box outline inside this box, you will move around the tree.  You can accomplish the same thing by clicking on the background of the tree and holding your left button down.  A hand will appear and you can move the picture with the hand to see the rest of the tree.)  This should be enough to get you started with the Ancestry.com trees.  All the details can be found in the link I gave you on "good tutorials."

PS.  If you double left click on a person, the Pedigree view of that person will be displayed.  There will be a line near the top of the Pedigree display that says something like "go back to tree."  This will bring you back to the above Family view.  Oh, if I have given you modify access, then you can add pictures and documents to any person.  That would be really nice.  I still need to retain control over entering new information, unless we are both at the point where the rules for changing the tree are understood.  It takes a lot of work to vet the tree- there is so much misinformation in the Ancestry.com databases.  I"ve been 4 years on the master Gov Leete tree and it is still not ready for prime time.  So, once a tree is vetted, we have to be careful to not add misinformation.  Thanks, Duane