Visualizing Shared Events in Your Tree

When I conduct collateral research, I like to add neighbors, friends, and possible relatives directly to my family file, linking them together using shared events. This increases the chance that I will accidentally happen across a family member, while also giving me an idea of their stance within the community. I decided to figure out how to display shared events in a way that I could see all the connections I'd established for a person with a single click. I found a completely free solution and will explain in the rest of this post what that solution was. These network graphs were the result of my efforts.

Network graph of all the people in my file based on their shared events

Filtered view within the network graph of just one person in my file and their connections

How to Manually Transfer Your Sources From Ancestry.com to Your Genealogy Program (Quickly)

It's been many months since I first decided that I wanted to manually transfer my sources from Ancestry.com to my genealogy program of choice, Legacy family tree. When I first started my transferring, Family Tree Maker was still actively supporting transfers of information from Ancestry.com to their program and now RootsMagic has introduced support. Yet, I still decided to manually transfer. There were quite a few reasons for my decision to manually reenter the information, but I'll just list the main ones:

1. Ancestry.com has abysmal sources for a lot of their documents in my opinion. In most cases the only halfway decent ones are censuses, and oftentimes I will find the auto-sourcing they do has incorrect values for fields like page numbers.
2. I want everything in my local tree to be as accurate as possible. When I first started working on my tree I was, let's face it, not especially concerned with accuracy. By going through each record individually I can check each record individually.
3. I can save source images to my local file. These aren't for anything other than my own personal reference, as it is not at all legal or encouraged to distribute these images (they are the property of ancestry), but if I ever need to cancel my subscription I can still glean information from them.
4. My tree on ancestry is not mine. I collaborate on it with my great uncle Van Wert (who did extensive work even before records were available online!). So even if I wanted to I wouldn't be able to download everything (which worked out for me in the end). 
5. Name recognition. When you force yourself to really read the records, you will begin to see the same names over and over. Name recognition has been crucial for me in finding immigrant ancestors, as its not abnormal for the names you see over and over to be family from overseas.