1. Whenever you come across a long location name on a person birth or death date make sure it is the correct information.
Many times, the records that populate that information comes from old records that have the old town, city, or state name.
To correct that long place name and to still have the old information one can edit the Facts box and type in there the old and new names.
This presentation will take you through the steps on how to do just that and will show more that you can do.
2. The first thing we should do when we are working on a tree is to generate a people list. A list that shows all the people on the tree but not only their names but their birth and death information.
To create a people list for this family tree, we click on Tree search at top left on a profile page or top right on a tree page.
Having selected “Tree search” you will get a new drop-down panel.
3. This drop-down panel has options one being a “List of all people” as shown here.
4. You will get the same panel if you do a “Tree search” from the family tree page as shown here.
5. When you click on the List of all people you will get the following page. Notice that indeed it shows all people on it, but that list will be way too long to work with.
6. So we define that we just want a list of the Dominguez Last Name.
When we click on Search, we get the following page.
7. Notice that only the last name Dominguez is showing on the list, and it is organized by first name so we see Adolfo Dominguez at top of the list and our person is a bit further down the list.
8. As we scroll down the list, we come to the end which has a box that allows us to define how many names we want per page; here we have asked for 100 per page. Notice also that the system is showing us that there are only 21 people with this specific name and the it is showing it to us on one page. On the list for all the names we could have dozens of pages with 100 names on each.
9. We now want to put this list of names onto a separate sheet of data so we can work on it without having to be on Ancestry to do so. We highlight the columns and copy all the data onto an Excel page that will look like this. By putting the names onto this spread sheet it will allow us to send it to other members of the family or to the owner of the tree if you are working on someone else’s tree.
We can see the long name for the birth location so we make a note of those names and we search the web to see if they still exist or if the names have changed.
10. When we do the web search we find that the state name is shorter
11. and that the Municipality name is also shorter.
12. We fix the names on the profile page and run a new people list. Notice that the new list is compressed and easier to read.
13. Now we go back to the profile page and using Edit in the Facts column in the Birth box we can add the information about the old name and the new name.
14. Since the information for the person comes from the Birth box.
Notice that the Birth has been set up to point to source records.
15. Notice that the information we typed into the birth box is not dynamic; we cannot just click on the link to go see where the new names came from. So, we have to use a different function below in the source column and we will put both names and links there.
16. The function is adding web links to the profile page so people can be directed to an outside web page.
Noticed we have put the two names in their own box and the link is available to be selected. Notice also that we can continue adding links to the profile page.
17. These links are the same information we had in the birth box.
18. Notice we spell out what is contained in the link; this helps other people who may look at this page in the future. Also notice as mentioned above the link is active.
19. So we went from having long location names on the profile page.
20. To have short location names which makes the list cleaner.
21. Now using the Family Tree people list and the Excel sheet, we can identify other areas we might want to work on for the Dominguez family on the tree.
By having the tree people list on an exterior sheet to work from we can identify missing info and things we’ve missed such as birth dates and places. We can identify the dates that are guess (Abt.) We can also see what information is missing.
Now that we have two new tools to use on our Ancestry family tree We will be able to work more efficiently on our family trees.
I am sure other systems have a way of listing out the people on the tree and so you can copy those lists onto an Excel page to use as a markup.
Here is an old blog post about generating a people list: https://wordpress.com/post/munozcollection.com/4664
Here is an old blog post about putting the people list onto an Excel. https://munozcollection.com/2016/09/26/using-excel-as-a-genealogy-tool/
I hope this tutorial has helped you today and that you will be able to use it in the future.
Thank You
Jose from Clarkston, Michigan
Genealogical Collection 
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