When You’re Bored Out of Your Mind…

…and not in the mood to do much of anything anyway.

Terry L. Cooper
2 min readSep 16, 2022
Screenshot from my Ancestry account

18,718. The number of people on my family tree at this moment. For at least two days now I’ve been doing the unthinkable. Page 1, right-click the first name on the list, review it and either delete or close. Lather, rinse, repeat. The first 8 pages have hyperlinks in them like above. Those are the names I’ve yet to work on. 8 pages x 100 names per page = way too freakin’ many. I got bored with that process and looked for something else to do instead.

This is a necessary task that I’ve been putting off for way too long. Ancestry doesn’t give you a list of names that you are no longer related to. Meaning…

Screenshot from my Ancestry account

as long as I pull up a name and there is a relationship listed under their vitals then it’s all good. If it’s missing they need to be deleted. How do non-relatives end up on your tree? Easy. You “were” related so you added them. Later on down the road you found a mistake and made a correction. Since everyone on the tree is connected to everyone else, if you make a correction it’s the domino effect. One correction in let’s say generation 9 affects generations 10 and beyond.

Here’s an example that I just happened upon.

Screenshot from my account

As you can see he has zero info. No relationship to me, DoB, DoD, parents, spouse, nada. I just deleted him.

It will be interesting to see once I get through Z just how many relations I have on my tree vs the number of names that I have on the tree!

Ancestry, can’t you show with a star or a red flag or something when there is no connection? Maybe add it to this list as there is clearly enough room to add another column.

Screenshot from my account

While you’re at it throw in a column of potential parents too!

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Terry L. Cooper

Writer for this platform since June 2020. See my pinned post for links to locate me all over the WWW.