“Brick Wall” Tags and Other Technological Innovations Coming to an Ancestry® Family Tree Near You

Brick walls might soon become more fun. (Image: John Vachon, 1938, U.S. Office of War Information).

The words “brick wall” are powerful—so potent, in fact, that just thinking them is often enough to cause even the most intrepid of genealogists to abandon their research in favor of a glass of wine and a good book. But the planned rollout of a new tool by Ancestry® may help family historians stay glued to their research projects longer by transforming those words from disheartening to merely descriptive.

That promising new tool is called MyTreeTags™, and it is slated for release by Ancestry® sometime later this year, according to a February 28, 2019 announcement by the company’s chief executive officer, Margo Georgiadis, who described the change as part of the company’s “commitment to continuous innovation.”

But, while the new tagging system will likely be helpful to everyone using the company’s technology to create online family trees, it will likely benefit those with larger trees most because it will enable users to label profiles of individual ancestors with “predetermined or custom tags,” such as “actively researching” to denote a profile’s current research status, “confirmed” or “unverified” to clarify whether or not the date for a particular profile is accurate or needs updating, or “blacksmith”, “immigrant”, “military”, “unmarried”, or “orphan.” Family historians will then be able to use those tags in combination with a special filter system developed by the company to retrieve lists of ancestors who fall under specific tags (such as everyone in a user’s tree who was a member of the military or worked as a coal miner, for example).

Project managers at the company expect that this new technology will help users “save time as they work to break through brick walls and enrich ancestor profiles.”

The former president of Americas, at Google Inc. and then CEO at Mattel, Inc., Georgiadis took over the helm at Ancestry® on May 10, 2018, following the company’s six-month, global search for new leadership. Expressing excitement at the time of her appointment, she said that, in addition to helping to facilitate “Ancestry’s mission to connect the world,” she also hoped to “enhance our consumers’ understanding of who they are and where they come from.”