Once you have created your initial tree with you and your parents and maybe spouse, you can add more people to the tree.
There are several ways to add people to a tree and I will show the many way’s I’ve found to do that.
Above is one way to add a person onto a tree right from the lines of the census record (or any record).
You first mouse over the names until you come to the person you want to add to your tree. That person may not have come into the tree when the record (census page) was put on the tree. In this case the Humphrey family has their grandchildren living with them and when I brought in the record to the head of the family the two children did not get picked up so I came back to this page and moused over Brent’s name.
He gets highlighted and his info shows up on the right hand side of the page.
I want to add him to the tree with this record so I click on “Save to person in your tree”. I do this even if Brent is not on my tree yet.
When I click on “Save…” this panel comes up. I make sure the tree I am working on is showing in the box. Then I pick “add to a new person” which is at the bottom of the panel. [This record will be added at the same time as a new person is added.]
When I select “add to…” this panel comes up which already had the information for my new person; in this case “Brent H Nelson”. Notice you can add or edit the panel but in most cases you will just accept the completed panel.
Once you accept the panel the profile page for the new person comes up. But the person is very lonely because he has no relationships; you see Add father, Add mother… etc… so >>>
So, we bring up his father Frank Nelson who had been on the tree.
We then click on Edit on top right and will click on Edit relationships.
When we click on edit relationships we get this panel where we can add father, mother, spouse, a child and since we want to add a child we click on the bottom item.
We get a chance to pick someone off of the tree or we can add a new person (another way to add people). Since we put Brent on the tree, we type in his name and the system will bring him up as soon as three characters are typed in so you will always get choices and you will not have to type in the full name; you can just click from the list.
We can add the other grandchild that was on the census page way up at the top of this “How To” lesson.
Her name is Judith and I had already put her on the tree using this same method, so her name pops up.
Once I complete the process both Brent and Judith will have a father and will have been added to the tree.
The above is just one way to add a person onto the tree.
Here is another way.
Add a new person onto the tree through the record you are looking at.
When you click on “Attach record to someone in your tree”, you have the option to add it to a new person.
Another way is through the profile page:
You can use two Add places on the profile page.
The first one on the top right will bring down a menu where you can pick what type of a person you want to add.
The second one on the lower right will bring up the same menu – where you can pick what type of a person you want to add.
Yet another way is through relationships which we talked about above.
and finally you can add a person right from the tree layout.
When you click on the icon “person +” this panel will come up giving you a choice.
In this case we want to add a child to Joan and so when we click on Child this panel comes up where we can type in the info for the child.
There you have it, many ways to add people onto your tree.
But wait there is more…
What if you don’t want to add a father, mother, spouse or child to the tree; what then?
Remember Relationships way up there … well, you can add a person onto any other person on the tree and then just remove the relationship to that person.
So, say I want to add Great Uncle Bob to the tree but I only know him from photos and stories about him. I don’t know who his parents are or what side of the family he comes from… He’s just Uncle Bob.
I can add him as the son of Joan Powell like we did above.
Once we have Uncle Bob on the tree, hanging off of Joan as a child, we bring up Uncle Bob’s profile page and then remove his mother Joan and any other relationship that appears on the relationship panel.
Once you have a clean relationship panel for Uncle Bob, he is on the tree but not attached to anyone and you can work on him until you figure out who he really belongs to.
He will not be part of the main tree but he will show up in the List of People on the tree and you can select him off of that list when you want to work on his profile page. Uncle Bob will come up as his own branch just not connected to your huge tree. Once you have figured out where on the tree Uncle Bob should be you can use the relationship tool to attach his branch to the main tree.
I hope this post has given you some new knowledge or just reminded you of what it was you did a while back when you added a new person onto the tree.
There are so many function on Ancestry and on other family tree making products that it is hard to keep track of all the ways of doing things. We can watch the YouTube videos of how to do things but sometimes we just want some place where we can go to learn how to do things; a place where we control what panel to read and where we can go back and forth to really learn the topic. I hope this is the place for you.
Thank You, Stay Safe
Jose A Munoz from Clarkston, Michigan, USA
Genealogical Collection 
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