Can You Change an Accepted Ancestry Hint? What I Found

Have you ever accepted a hint on Ancestry, only to realize as you're filling in the information—the hint actually doesn't match up? It happens! Probably to all of us at some point. For ages, once you accepted an incorrect hint, the only thing you could do was delete any incorrect facts, sources and potential images, and then make a note the hint was subsequently removed. Frustratingly, the hint itself stubbornly remained as Accepted. I never understood why this wasn't addressed. I’ve wondered whether this could affect future hints for the person.

Before I explain my latest discovery, I want to be clear—I have no clue if this is an oversight on the part of Ancestry's programmers, or if it's an intended new (as of yet undisclosed) feature. I haven't seen any official mention of this. While I've tested it on a couple of different occasions, and it seems to work, I cannot conclusively say it will work for every situation. And I can't promise it will remain available. With caveats in place...here's the big reveal!

So, you've just realized you accepted a hint in error? First, go back to the hints page for the person. I did test this from the person profile, by viewing the source and choosing View Record, but it does not work from the person profile:

Don't try this from the person profile

You want to go to the person's Hints page, scroll to the bottom where you can see Undecided, Ignored and Accepted hints. Expand the Accepted section and find the hint you want to change. Right-click to reopen the hint in a new browser tab. (Note: I did try single click to open the slider and while some hints worked, others did not show all the options to reselect. Opening in a new tab seems to behave consistently.)

Access accepted hints from the person's hint page

This will open the hint again. You'll notice from the highlight below, it clearly shows as attached to a person in the tree. But you also have the ability to choose again: Yes, No or Maybe. On the Hints page, those choices appear under Accepted, Ignored and Undecided, respectively.

Reselect the appropriate choice

Before I change this hint (as it is actually correct and I will accept it again when I’m done), I want to show you how many hints showed as accepted before I do this:

Before the change

After I go back and click "No", now look at the results:

After the change

For this test, I did not delete anything on the person's profile before making this change. I wanted to be sure of what happens when this is done. I want to emphasize—my test shows the hint moved out of Accepted while the attached source and facts stayed on the profile. Ancestry does not make any changes to the person profile. If you want to remove the incorrect Source and any associated facts, you still need to do this yourself manually. This is exactly as it should be. Ancestry does not make changes to people in your tree - you do!

My workflow for these cases is as follows:

• Remove facts first. 
• Then remove the source. Note: Any time you remove a source, it also removes any corresponding image from the Source tab in the gallery (such as census or death certificate images). This is not new and is exactly as I would expect it to be since the source image is part of the Ancestry source.
• If you checked a box to use the image as the profile picture (such as a yearbook photo) and it was saved in the Gallery separately from the source image, you may still need to remove it manually.
• Then I go back to the Accepted hint and reselect either No or Maybe.

So, for my like-minded OCD fellow family historians, it certainly seems you can now "clean up" when you make a bit of a mistake. As far as I know, there has been no change to how you remove a photo you've saved. You've always been able to delete those directly in the Gallery. We've also been able to move between Ignored and Undecided for ages, but Accepted was completely different. Now it seems, at least for the moment, we have an option to correct these little Oopsies! 

Once again, no promises this will remain available. I can also only say it seems to work on the US site. If you use one of the international domains and try this out, please comment and let me know if it also works for you.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay  

Disclosure: I used ChatGPT to assist with a title and search description, and to review this post for clarity, punctuation and grammar. Unless otherwise indicated, the content and all opinions are my own.