Searching through family tree on Ancestry.com by LOCATION?

Question

If I want to find a particular person in my family tree on Ancestry, I use the field in the top right-hand corner of the screen that says "Find a person in this tree". A drop-down menu then appears, matching whatever I type, that can lead me to that person. But this is searching by NAME. What do I do if I want to search in my family tree by LOCATION?

Is there a way to easily find out who came from say, Cincinnati, or the state of Ohio, without clicking on each and every profile?

UPDATE: I just wanted to give better explanation as to why I need this feature. If I am on a genealogy research trip or if I pick up a community history book, my brain can only remember so many patriarchs/matriarchs for each location. It's challenging to remember all the names of uncles, cousins and neighbours to check also in a resource. It's great when you can plan ahead and prepare a list of people to look up, but sometimes you don't have time to plan ahead, before the resource is right in front of you. Then you may do a search for everything you can remember, but when you get home you later realize that you should have also looked for so-and-so. Or, I might be doing research and my brain might tickle and try to tell me that a location is important.. but it won't necessarily remind me exactly what, or who, I was supposed to remember to look for in that location. Since I have the Ancestry phone app, I can look up the location tags I've assigned really quickly and easily now. Brilliant solution!

Answer 1

With the new MyTreeTagsTM feature, you could add custom tags to the profiles for the study places you most want to find. [Note: This answer was originally written while the feature was still in beta. It has since been rolled out to all users.]

On the top navigation bar on Ancestry, look for where it says Extras. Pull down the drop-down menu, and select Ancestry Lab.

MyTreeTagsTM beta

Add labels to people in your tree to highlight personal details or to clarify your research status. If you enable this feature, you will be able to access it directly > from your tree and on every Facts page for the people in your tree.

Underneath the description, you should see Enable Feature? and two buttons that say YES NO.

Choose YES to enable the feature. Underneath the feature description, the YES NO buttons change to links that say Enable and Disable. If you decide you don't like a Lab feature, you can turn it off.

Tags that you've added to a profile are displayed on the pedigree view by clicking on the box with a person's name. On the Profile, the first three tags show up on the banner, underneath the results of the Relationship Calculator. A plus sign appears if you have more than three tags.

The new Tree Search feature opens up a Workspace panel on the right-hand side of the page, where you can search the entire tree, access the List of All People, or apply filters before you search. Clicking on Filters will open up a new panel "Filter by My Tree TagsTM"

To create new tags, click on the pencil icon on the banner. This will open up a Workspace panel with three tabs: MyTreeTagsTM, Notes, and Comments. Hit the Edit button on the MyTreeTagsTM tab and choose Custom Tags.

For a demo, see Crista Cowan's Barefoot Genealogist video Use MyTreeTags™, New on Ancestry via her Ancestry Desktop Education playlist on Ancestry's YouTube channel.

Further reading: Ancestry Support Article MyTreeTags™ (May 29, 2019)

Answer 2

My understanding is that such a feature does not currently exist in Ancestry.com.

Every time I am asked to complete a customer feedback survey from Ancestry.com this is at the top of my list of new features that I would like to see.

Ancestry.com does have a feature called Search By Location:

Ancestry allows you to search for records for an ancestor from a specific geographic region. For example, if you know that your ancestors came from New York, you may search for specific records from New York.

However, being able to search for record collections in a geographic area is not the same (or as useful) as being able to search all the locations that you have assigned to events for people in your tree to tell you who has "touched foot" in a geographic area.

Answer 3

I realize this thread is a couple years old, but since I searched for this very thing today I thought I'd add how I did accomplish this, online at Ancestry, using just my family tree.

When you are looking at your tree, on the upper right is a bar that you can pull down find people. Instead of putting a name in the search box, choose "List of All People" which is currently the last option.

For me, I have about 11 pages of people, and using this method took me under 5 minutes.

Once each page loads, on your web browser do a CTRL+F for "Find" and a bar pops up at the top. Type the location you're searching for. In my case it was "Ireland"

It'll scan each page and either return 0 for none or it will highlight any records that match what you typed. You can then right click on the persons name and say "Open in New Tab/Window" and view their record.

Voila. It's not pretty, but it gets the job done.

Answer 4

I recommend downloading the GEDCOM of your tree from Ancestry and uploading it to Gigatrees - http://gigatrees.com/. You'll be able to generate an offline tree that lets you search by location and see every family member you have listed for that particular place. It's one of my most frequently used resources. The site also has a wide variety of other useful tools and resources.

From their site:

Your Gigatree will include separate profile pages for each person, place, and source found in your database. Each profile page is organized by tabs and will include as much information as we can find in your database that is associated with that profile, including all claims, source references, external links, photos, notes, etc. We will also create and include on an appropriate tab, family tree charts, location maps, distribution heatmaps, generation lists, and timelines.

Your Gigatree will include a number of other separate pages and reports including a master timeline, a statistics page, a page showing the latest updates to your database, an overall population distribution heatmap, a must-have Census Table Report and Bonkers, our popular data consistency and sanity report.

Answer 5

I've just found FTAnalyzer which is searchable by place:

Use FTAnalyzer to investigate your family tree in new and interesting ways, see where your ancestors lived and moved over time on the new maps feature.