Beware deleting dead Ancestry "Source" link

Question

There has been a thread on deleting a source that is a link to an Ancestry tree that cannot be found. Some notation about this link should be kept, since it might be a clue to find information.

I just encountered one of these, as the only "source" in a profile. The Ancestry tree could not be found. I signed onto Ancestry and did a search for the Profile Manager (by name). Once I found them, I looked at their trees, and found the person in the profile. That led me to the Ancestry trees used for the 'source' of that person. By looking at those dozen or so trees, there was one or two that had a record source. (The record source, btw, does lead me to suspect that some of the data in the profile is incorrect; more research is required however.)

Comments

see this post for ways to fix most "broken" ancestry links: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/477354/dead-ancestry-links?show=479425

Answer 1

I usually mark the link as "dead ancestry link" in bold. I'm not an ancestry subscriber, but I have trees there from the past subscription, so I can see when a link leads to SOMETHING. That is not a dead link. A dead one shows a page that says something like "this link is unavailable", and it's usually to a tree.

Comments

Exactly.... the dead link is to an Ancestry tree, which takes you to "We’re sorry, this page is no longer available."

So even though this is a dead link, if you are able to get onto Ancestry and find the Profile Manager and look at their tree, you might get some clues. Does that make sense?

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Yes, this is why I leave the note with the link. Ancestry subscribers may be able to check it, and the rest of us can ignore it.

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I joined Ancestry a week ago and got the message "We’re sorry, this page is no longer available" as I was accepting one of  their "hints". I'd only been on the site half an hour and already it was telling me the page no longer existed, which of course was twaddle, so you cannot be sure it's a dead link, unless you try it a few times and it consistently refuses to give you a page.

Answer 2

This has been the subject of numerous posts on G2G and the best thing that a person can do is to replace the broken link with "based on Ancestry.com trees"   That way, those of us that wish to do research will have a clue of where to start.   Or just leave the link with a note that the link is broken.

Answer 3

I did not know there is a way to trace the dead Ancestry "we're sorry this link is no longer available" sources. I will leave the sources intact with a "dead link -- might be traced" notation.

Thank you Kay, Dennis, Natalie and Robin for the information.