An Unheralded Star

 

Some changes arrive with much fanfare. Others slip in, almost unnoticed. The star I spotted today was one of those latter unheralded entries.

While working on my Twelve Most Wanted project for this month—finding more documentation on my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak—behind the scenes, I've also been updating all the records linked to each of her descendants. Working my way down the line of descent from her daughter Marianna, I suddenly realized there was this little star next to Marianna's name.

That's funny, I thought. I hadn't noticed that before. I certainly didn't put it there. Hovering my cursor over the star, I noticed the words pop up, "Prioritize this person."

Not wanting to find myself in the position of Alice in Wonderland, staring at the little cake labeled "eat me," I was disinclined to click on that recently-appearing star. I did a search to see whether Ancestry.com had recently posted any announcements about that change on their blog. 

Nothing. 

I poked around my own tree and realized that if I clicked on the icon for adding labels—a change at Ancestry which has been around for a while now—among the many choices for "My Tree Tags" was a group called "Research Status Tags." And—you guessed it—within that cluster was a choice labeled "Prioritized Person."

It took a bit more exploration before I could find an additional explanation. Still, that announcement arrived almost accidentally as I continued my work on those Olejniczak descendants. A pop-up window advised, "Prioritize up to ten people in your tree that you're most interested in learning about." I can't even recall how I first spotted that notice, but suddenly, there it was.

After mentioning that the ancestor so marked will display a star icon, the explanation continued, "We'll put special focus on finding hints about them." The entry concluded with a "Got it" button at the bottom of the window.

Special focus on finding more hints? I'm game to see what will happen. However, I already know that Ancestry.com's collection is rather sparse when it comes to Polish records for the region and time period specific to my own ancestors. Granted, with the changing boundaries—and languages—of that geographic area, I'm facing even more challenges, but if a simple star next to Franziska Olejniczak's name can lead me to more information, I'll eagerly look forward to seeing it.