Update: As of 20 Jul 2026 the checkboxes and notes appear to be back!! (A big thank you to the person who commented on my post!)
I truly have no words (well, no words I can share here) for the abysmal change
Ancestry rolled out to me today. The change is to the Hints screen within a person's profile. At first, I thought I was just dealing with another frustrating layout change. Then I discovered something far worse.
First, from the All Hints page, if you click a person's name (a hyperlink) instead of being taken to the person's profile, you're now unceremoniously dumped on their Hints page (and no, it doesn't look anything like it did before!) One would think a name hyperlink would take you to the person, but now, you have to backtrack to get to the profile. So if you like to review your person before working with new hints—you now have the joy of more clicks.
Once you do manage to get to the person profile, Hints is no longer a nice easy separate tab. It's a button underneath the relationship.
When you click said button, all your hints, accepted, rejected or otherwise, are now on one big long page. If you want to see previously accepted, rejected or undecided hints, you'll need to scroll to the bottom of the page, past all the unreviewed hints and then click to expand the section you want to see. I know, I know, scrolling and extra clicking is obviously a great use of our time...NOT! And undecided only shows as an option if something exists in the category. If not, it doesn't show as an option.
But the thing frustrating me the most is the checkboxes and comments on why a hint was accepted, rejected or left undecided. Maybe not everyone uses them, but I've meticulously documented my reasons for every hint I've ever worked with. Those notes are invaluable as I'm trying to see why I did or didn't accept something. They're critical to evaluating name twins. And now? The checkboxes are blank, as is the comment field (see the image above). Tens of thousands of hints worth of documentation appear to be gone in one fell swoop. Hundreds upon hundreds of hours of work...
I hold out very little hope any of my hard work will be recovered (though I have posted in a Facebook forum where employees of Ancestry are known to pop on from time to time). I've posed the question, and now I wait and hope I'll receive an answer. Hopefully, it's simply a glitch they can resolve. In the meantime, I guess I'll have to decide if I'm going to boycott researching until I get an answer, continue as I have been and write off all my previous work and carry on with a move forward plan, or proceed with researching and never again give Ancestry one iota of information they might be able to use to improve their algorithms.
If the fields had been eliminated, I'd still be upset, but I'd understand. But it's not the case. All the fields still exist—they're simply all blank. For me, the loss of this information borders on catastrophic. Next time I encounter a name twin I've previously documented, none of my research notes will be available to me. While I don't care for the new hints page, I'm not actually suggesting they roll it back entirely. I'm only suggesting they restore the user-entered information they deleted.
If you're like me, and you document everything, please take time to submit feedback or post in one of the many Facebook forums for Ancestry users. I've done both. If enough users voice their concerns, Ancestry has occasionally rolled back changes.
The new hints page does not appear to be a beta feature. I received a pop up telling me to take a look at the new hints page the first time I landed there. Ancestry needs to know if users are happy or unhappy with new changes. If you're so inclined, you can submit feedback using this link once you've received and had a chance to work with the new layouts. I guess I had more words than I thought...
If I hear any updates or the notes are restored, I'll update this post with the outcome.
Disclosure: I used ChatGPT to assist with a title and search description. Post content is my own.
