It's time for this week's Ancestry Quick Tip Jamboree! Thanks to everyone who has sent in a Quick Tip. Please keep them coming so that we can keep this tradition going. You can send your tips to ADNeditor@ancestry.com.

Quick Tips may be reprinted, with credit to the submitter, in other Ancestry publications, so if you do not want your tip included in a publication other than the Ancestry Daily News and Ancestry Weekly Digest, please state so clearly in your message.

Have a great day!

Juliana

Explore the Reporting Features of Your Genealogy Software

To elaborate on Laurie Miller's tip on Timelines: the best attribute of a good genealogy program is that you never have to retype any information. Every good program has the capability of creating custom lists and sorting them anyway you like. In addition to the timelines that Laurie mentions; I have created lists specific to each census year giving the names (including married names), birth dates, and localities of everyone alive at the time of the census. The time spent learning how your particular program creates custom lists will save you hours of keyboard time.

Mary Herzog
Napa, California

Sorting Information That Doesn't Quite Fit
We've learned that you sometimes have to be cautious about the data provided by a related family researcher.  When we first began researching my husband's mother's family, a distant relative gave us information, some of which just did not seem to fit, so we just put it aside for a while. 

Later on a vacation trip, we visited the village of the family in question and located a small, but quite good genealogy room in an old school converted to other uses.  They had an excellent file of newspaper clippings, including obituaries. 

I copied every one in which that particular surname appeared.  That evening I simply spread them on a table, building a family tree as I went.  The clippings nearly always named parents, often the spouse's maiden name, children, siblings and even who attended from out of town and where they were from. 

Wow!  I wound up with two family trees (ours was the smaller, by the way), but I learned that the local bank president in the 1890's did not "belong" to us.  It was a fun exercise, and I then donated my results to the local history room of a nearby library.

Louise Hawley
Lillian, Alabama

Search for Middle Names and Initials

I have found that my ancestors used their middle names, as well as their initials instead of their first names.  So if you are having trouble locating them in the census.  Try using their middle and or their initials to locate them.

Audrey Buono