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Last couple of days Im having probs on and off with ancestry - wont connect and when it does it just hangs when I do a search.
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And then it gives you the charming portrait of the old-timey kid or whatever it is, telling you that your search can't be completed because of routine maintenance or some other fairy tale.
Just hit refresh, and you'll usually get the results right away.
Mind you, if you don't even get that far, I dunno! Hit the search button again maybe.
Various bits of the search function apparently weren't working the other day. It was completely ignoring me when I specified parent's or spouse's name, for instance.
It's always something over there ...
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No, I havent got the snotty kid with the rope this time, I just have it hanging in air.
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It has been very slow to load pages recently.
I originally thought that maybe they were loading something useful (wishfully thinking Essex Parish Records LOL) but it has gone on for far longer than would normally happen for that.
I haven't seen the boy with the noose for a while....Probably I'm just lucky :)
Chris
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I have had no problems to-day. For a change!
Sheila
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Blow me ancestry is ok now but hotmail isnt working - scream.
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Hotmail! Hotmail!!!
Who still uses hotmail when there is gmail??
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Infinitely, infinitely better. I've been using Gmail for several years, and I'll never leave it.
I have an account for genealogy, two accounts for work, three accounts for various internet crap (of the kind likely to generate spam, just nonsense names), one account dedicated to GR so that message reply notifications and hot match type bumph don't fill up my real inboxes, and on and on.
Gmail does wonderful things.
You can label your posts. So in my genealogy account, I have a primary label for each grandparent's surname, starting with "1" (so they appear first in alphabetically listed labels attached to a message):
1Carryon
1Browncow
1Montmorency
1Dadadada
Then I have a label for each surname in my tree. That way I can identify correspondence from a particular person as having to do with grandmother 1Carryon and specifically with the family of her grandmother, Goosedown.
Then if I want to see correspondence about the Goosedown family, I just click on that label in the list, and there it all is.
Gmail also creates threaded conversations of your very own in your inbox -- as long as nobody in the conversation changes the subject (line, that is!), the whole thing will appear just like a thread does here, only on a single page (you can also collapse the thread so it isn't all spread out), and if you want to check what your fifth cousin Goosedown said about your mutual Horsefeathers ancestor, you can just look upthread and see the details.
And you can search your email account, just the way you search with google. There's a search box up top, and it takes two seconds to get results. You can even search within a particular label, just the way you can use google to search within a particular site.
(to do that with google, you put, e.g.:
site:www.genesreunited.co.uk,
and whatever term you're looking for, in the search box)
What else does it do ...
It never ever ever deletes your mail. Except for spam, which it catches 99% of and hides in your spam box.
It has humongous storage capacity: 5110 MB at the moment. I have over 1,000 messages in the account I've been using for genealogy for nearly 3 years, including big family tree files and images and so on, and I'm using 7% of capacity.
So you can actually use it to store big files in and access any time you want (I have a couple of accounts dedicated to just that), without using up space on your computer, and probably more safely in case of crashes.
When you get an attachment, you can view it as html the way you can view google's cached versions of websites -- useful if you hate pdf like I hate pdf, for instance.
It's fast as stink. You can send great big enormous attachments in a few seconds.
How'm I doing? And I'm a "volunteer" for gmail, too. ;)
It used to be you needed an invitation to get an account. I got in early, so I was able to claim multiple variations of my real name --
kathryn.browncow, kxbrowncow, kathryn.x.browncow, kxbkxb, etc.
Names are harder to get these days, but you could probably still come up with some version of your real name that you could get, if you wanted. I think someone got k.x.browncow before I did, but I could likely get browncow.k.x.
And I make related accounts by adding extensions: kathryn.x.browncow.pix for instance.
It presents you with little google ads down one side of your screen that you actually never notice. There'll be a lot of Ancestry ads. ;) No popups. No flashing.
I know you're excited at the very prospect of all this free stuff, so I won't keep you waiting any longer:
http://www.gmail.com
Go get 'em!
Oh, you can also redirect mail from other accounts there, I gather; a feature I've never used, but if you're switching it would be handy.
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Blimey Kath, you are a real saleswoman, arent you. The threaded messages would require the person t'other end also being on gmail.
I dont quite get all the labels stuff, it seems a bit beyond me at the mo, but may be when I get it Ill understand.
Ill go and have a look. I have to say I was a bit peeved when I realised hotmail had stopped saving my sent mails which were really quite important to have a copy of.
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Right Kath, signed up with not a bad version of my name - how do I import all my contacts from O.E. and Hotmail please. I dont understand their explanation re CVS file or something?
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Nonono!
For the messages to stay threaded, all it requires is that the other person use the "reply" function in his/her own email thingy, and *not change the subject line*.
Mind you, it doesn't matter how many times and how nicely I ask people to please please please *not change the subject line*, they usually just send me new messages called "hello" or some moronic thing, completely losing the train of thought for me ...
One fellow I met through Ancestry, when he saw some notes I'd made to an ancestor of his, completely unrelated to me but noticed when I was searching for somebody, stuck to the rule religiously. We just got to chatting about this and that, and he set about finding things related to my mysterious Hill/Monck gr-grfather and found that one household in the family the mystery man's sister's husband's sister married into once lived in the house occupied by the prime suspect for being Jack the Ripper, etc etc. We have a 40-message thread with some ludicrous big long title that just happened to be what he put on his first message to me, but it doesn't matter 'cause I know that *that* thread is the conversation with John.
The labels stuff actually is really easy, it just requires not procrastinating.
You create labels -- easy to do, you just go to the pull-down menu up top and fill in the box.
When you get a message, you go to the pull-down menu and select the label you want to attach to it. Then the other label you want to attach to it. Takes two seconds.
You don't *have* to label messages, but if you want to quickly find all the messages that refer to your grx2 grparents named Horsefeathers and their ancestors, it's really handy to have the labels.
Good heavens, stopped saving your sent mails?? Tell them buh-bye! Gmail saves your drafts. Forever.
I feel like a schoolyard pusher ...
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Oh, well, I don't know about that stuff!
I hate address books. Never use 'em.
What you could do is forward a message from each person to your gmail account. Then you'd have a thread all ready to start!
Other than that, maybe there's a real gmail whiz around here who could say. You could start a gmail thread and ask!
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And to import my contacts please?
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Must have been typing at same time. I see - but Ive an awful lot of contacts.
Ill start a thread over on FTF on the computer help!
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