Fantastic Find: Genea-Musing's Ancestry Hack to Search Hints By Specific Database

Want to search for hints from a specific database on your Ancestry tree?

Find your Ancestry tree number = treenumb (you can find this in every URL when you are looking at your tree)

Find the Ancestry database number = dbas

Insert those values into this URL:
http://hints.ancestry.com/tree/treenumb/hints?hf=record&hs=last&hdbid=dbas

If, like me, you regularly visit Randy Seaver's blog Genea-Musings you've probably already seen this hack ("Mining Ancestry.com Hints by Specific Record Collection - Updated"), but I love to refer to it whenever Ancestry releases a new database, like they did today for their "U.S., World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1942" in time for Memorial Day weekend.

So for today's release I would use the following info:
the database number: http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1002
and my tree number: http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/14683958/family?cfpid=145378340

to get this:
http://hints.ancestry.com/tree/14683958/hints?hf=record&hs=last&hdbid=1002

This is a sample of the results.  30 pages??  I'd better get to work!

I often use this to check and see if any given database can be mined effectively.  It also helps me a regularly sweep of my entire tree (which is full of collateral relations as well as my direct ancestors), which is often neglected.


Edited to add 11 March 2023: This hack no longer works 😒


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