• FamilySearch has added another 30 million new, free records to its historical records website—16 million indexed names and 14 million browsable images. Highlighting the additions are new databases from Canada, England, Germany, Italy, Micronesia, Slovenia and the United States. The new records also include millions of US births, marriages and deaths, and over 9 million church records from Sweden. See the list of new collections here.

FamilySearch also has launched a free mobile app for the iPad, iPhone and Droid that lets volunteers index digitized records. You can find it by searching for FamilySearch Indexing in the Apple App Store or Android Marketplace.

• Ancestry.com is giving away not one but three grand prize $10,000 family history trips in its Ultimate Family History Journey Sweepstakes. And 20 first prize winners will get an Ancestry.com World Explorer membership. You can enter daily through May 18.

• Library and Archives Canada is starting a monthly podcast series called Discover Library and Archives Canada (LAC): Your History, Your Documentary Heritage. Episodes will introduce you to LAC services and archivists. You can subscribe to episodes using RSS or iTunes, or tune in on the LAC website.

• The Civil War Trust is holding its 16th annual battlefield cleanup called Park Day on Saturday, March 31. More than 100 sites in 25 states are taking part, with activities ranging from trash removal to trail building. Click here to find a site near you and learn about specific projects.

• The National Genealogical Society has a new online events calendar where organizations that have a valid subscription to NGS can list their events (and, of course, you can look for events to attend). The calendar isn't searchable, but you can use your browser's Find function (control-F or command-F) to look for a particular topic, place, date or speaker.

• Genealogists have formed the Family History Information Standards Organisation (FHISO), to develop standards for the digital representation and sharing of family history informaiton. The goal is to make data exchanging work with different genealogy websites, software, applications and other services. FHISO will sponsor the Build a BetterGEDCOM Project, a grassroots effort started last year.

Friday, February 10, 2012 3:00:43 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Mocavo Rolls Out New Content, Features
• GeneTree Introduces New Test, Consultation Service
• 1940 Census Community Project Update
• Brightsolid to Launch 1st Pay-As-You-Go Census Records Site
• Ancestry.com to Live-Stream its RootsTech Presentations
• RootsTech: Sessions You Can Watch From Home
• Four Genealogists to Compete for Top Honors at RootsTech

Next year, RootsTech will be a little later in the year, March 21-23, in Salt Lake City.

Thursday, February 09, 2012 9:10:04 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• A couple of weeks ago, I was editing our Cincinnati City Guide (look for it in the May/June 2012 Family Tree Magazine), which is where we’re based and my maternal side comes from. Birth and death certificates from 1865 to 1912, I noticed, are in an online database from the University of Cincinnati. I found my great-grandfather's birth certificate (below), along with those of his siblings.
  
  

• There's also a local index to gravestones in area German Catholic cemeteries, where I found the family's burials (I need to plan a trip there come spring).

• Then I tried out the Genealogy Today data service after I saw an announcement the Surname Search was updated. I try out resources on my family names, though I never expect much when I type in Haddad. But this time, the hit I got partially answered a longstanding question. The site has indexes from biennial reports of a Texas orphanage, which list my grandfather and his two siblings as "inmates." I knew my grandfather and his brother were there, but their sister's whereabouts at that time had been a mystery.

• Next, I Googled the report titles and discovered them listed in a finding aid on the Texas State Library and Archives Commission website. I zipped off an email requesting copies, and had the scans in less than two weeks. Next up: requesting my great-aunt's 1913 admission records. 

• I also noticed a beta collection of city directories on Ancestry.com. Texas is among the handful of states included, with several directories for Corsicana. They list my grandfather as a helper at a local bakery that's still open and is pretty famous.
  
  
  

• Another email, and I learned the bakery's records don't go back to the 20s. But I ran a web search and found a transcript of a 1971 oral history with the bakery owners cataloged on the Baylor University Libraries' website. I emailed a request and had a digitized copy of the transcript within a day. Impressive! One of the bakery owners started work there as a schoolboy, about the same time as my grandfather, and now I have an idea of what the work was probably like.
  
  
  

Monday, February 06, 2012 11:06:56 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [4]

Ancestry.com also will live-stream several presentations by its staff. See the list on Ancestry.com’s Facebook page.

My top picks:

• The Inner-workings of the Ancestry.com Search Engine, Friday, Feb. 3, 3 pm MST
  
  
• 5 New Things to Try at Ancestry.com, Friday, Feb. 3, 1:45 pm MST
  
  
• Who Do You Think You Are? Live Q&A: How Do Our Experts Search?
  Saturday, Feb. 4, 2:30pm MST (This is the day after NBC's season 3 premiere of "Who Do You Think You Are?" so you may get some insider details on the Martin Sheen episode.)

We're joining in the RootsTech excitement with conference specials for everyone! You'll get 20 percent off select online genealogy titles at ShopFamilyTree.com.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012 12:56:02 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Ancestry.com, WeRelate.org and BehindtheNames.com have started a project to compile a database of surname and given name variants that should be searched along with whatever name you type into a genealogy database.

Traditionally, the Soundex system and/or a site's own algorithms determine what matches you see, but these still can return matches that don't make sense and miss good matches.

The project will improve searching on WeRelate.com, but any genealogy data site will be able to use the Variant Names Project database to improve its searching.

You can help build the database by adding alternate spellings for the surnames in your family tree. First, you'll need to create a free WeRelate account by clicking create account at the top of the page.

On the Variant Names project home, select given name or surname, enter the name and hit Go.

You'll see a list of potential alternate spellings with checkboxes. The checked names are included in online searches for the name you entered. (In addition, rare names that share a Soundex code are also included.) Unchecked names aren't included.

Review the list and think about variations you've found in your research. You'll uncheck variants of the name that shouldn't be included in searches, check names that should be included, and add other names in the text box at the bottom of the screen.

The starting-point lists came from an algorithm Ancestry.com and WeRelate came up with to find similar names for the 200,000 most-frequent surnames and 70,000 most-frequent given names in Ancestry.com's databases. Names also were added from BehindtheName.com, a site about the etymology of given names, as well as name dictionaries.

Monday, January 30, 2012 3:47:49 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Our friend Photo Detective Maureen Taylor is holding a funny family photo contest. Upload your photo with a little information, and get your friends and family to vote it the "SOS" (Silly Old Snapshot). Prizes include a free photo consultation sponsored by VoiceQuilt.com, a copy of Fashionable Folks: Bonnets and Hats, and more. Get details here.

• Ancestry.com has added more than 7 million records from 300 years of Pennsylvania history. The records, from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, are in the databases Pennsylvania, Naturalizations, 1794-1908 and Pennsylvania, Church and Town Records, 1708-1985.

• Subscription site British Origins has added the Middlesex Baptisms Index: 1538-1751, which records nearly 100,000 baptisms—about 300,000 names when you add in parents and sponsors—in Middlesex and London.

• Free genealogy search engine Mocavo has made two big hires: Michael Leclerc, who spent 15 years with the New England Historic Genealogical Society, as Chief Genealogist; and Ryan Hunter, a former Wall Street analyst who covered companies including Ancestry.com, as COO.

Friday, January 27, 2012 3:57:39 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

New content coming in 2012 includes:

• the 1940 census, which you've probably already heard will be free on Ancestry.com and elsewhere
  
  
• the complete, indexed 1911 UK census
  
  
• more US vital records
  
  
• new church records, including specifically for US Quaker records, UK non-conformist records and Swedish church records
  
  
• US and UK occupation-related records railroad and maritime records

New features to watch for on the site include:

• new Ancestry hints for people in your Ancestry tree
  
  
• a new image viewer (already being beta tested) that makes record images clearer, plus a new image viewing experience rolled out with popular census collections (this may incorporate some of the features of the sophisticated image viewer on Footnote/Fold3, which Ancestry.com acquired last year)
  
  
• new Android mobile apps (usable on the Kindle Fire, NOOK and other Android-powered tablets and phones) to join the iPhone and iPad apps
  
  
• easier sharing of genealogical discoveries through social networking
  
  
• advances in Ancestry.com DNA testing (perhaps with autosomal tests)
  
  
• help determining which record collections likely contain records about your ancestors
  
  
• more opportunities to learn from Ancestry.com staff genealogists

Monday, January 09, 2012 1:37:15 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [2]

• MacFamilyTreeSynium has released version 6.2 of its MacFamilyTree desktop software and version 1.1 of the MobileFamilyTree Pro app for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Both feature a new Tree Chart showing all connected persons in a family tree, as well as new reports, improved GEDCOM support and more. The Family Quiz, previously available only in the mobile app, is now also part of the MacFamilyTree software.

Users of MacFamilyTree 6 or MobileFamilyTree Pro 1.0 can upgrade to the new versions for free. Those with earlier versions of MacFamilyTree can update to the most recent version for $12.50.

Otherwise, a holiday sale lets you purchase MacFamilyTree 6.2 for $29 (requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later) and MobileFamilyTree Pro 1.1 for $7.99.

• Ancestry.com has released Family Tree Maker for Mac 2, which includes TreeSync. This feature lets you sync your family tree in the software with your tree on Ancestry.com.

Also new: You can take photos using your iSight or built-in camera and import them directly into Family Tree Maker. If you’re on OS X Lion, you can use the new full-screen capability to fill your entire desktop with the Family Tree Maker workspace.

You can get Family Tree Maker for Mac 2 in the Ancestry.com online store (it's currently discounted to $52.49) or at retailers such as , Fry’s Home Electronics, and Micro Center.

Friday, December 16, 2011 2:04:45 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Due to sensitivities around the information in this database, the Social Security Death Index collection is not available on our free Rootsweb service but is accessible to search on Ancestry.com.

The SSDI is a database of deaths reported to the Social Security Administration, for the most part since 1962. A subscription is required to use Ancestry.com's version of the SSDI, and genealogists including Randy Seaver and Sheri Fenley report that Social Security numbers aren't provided for deaths within the past 10 years.

You might think genealogists wouldn't be concerned with such a recent death, but someone who died in 2002 might've been born in 1920, and his or her application for an SSN (called an SS-5) could name parents born in the 1800s. Plus, the SSDI is useful for tracing family lines forward in time to find distant cousins.

Randy lists other sources of the SSDI, which include the free FamilySearch site.

If you don't have a deceased person's SSN, you still can request his or her SS-5. You'll need to provide a birth date, any other names the person used, and the parents' names, and pay $29 instead of $27. You now can request an SS-5 online.

The "sensitivities" RootsWeb refers to are likely related to a recent news story about criminals using SSNs of deceased individuals to commit tax fraud. (Couldn't the IRS prevent this by comparing SSNs on tax forms to numbers in the SSDI?)

Read more on recent SSDI changes, which include a reduction in the number of new deaths that'll be included in this database, here.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011 10:54:22 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [7]

• Ancestry.com has upgraded its mobile app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. New features include 99-cent in-app purchasing of individual records for non-Ancestry.com subscribers (such as World War I draft cards, census records, birth and death certificates, and school yearbook photos), the "shaky leaf" hints indicating a possible record match to somone in a user's family tree, and easier updating of family trees with information from historical records.
  

The app, which boasts more than 1.7 million downloads to date, is free from the Apple App Store.

• FamilySearch.org has added more than 18 million records from Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Haiti, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Spain, the United States and Venezuela. US records include a Texas death index (provided by Ancestry.com); naturalization index cards from Louisiana, Texas and Wisconsin; county records from several states and more.

You can view all the new and updated collections and click to each one here.

• SavingOurs.com is a new volunteer group dedicated to saving historical newspapers and other documents. The organization will work with local volunteers, companies and governments to digitize these documents and ensure they're available free to the public. Visit SavingOurs.com to learn more or volunteer.

• Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has started a blog as a four-month-long pilot project. It'll offer tips and tools on LAC's records and navigating its website. Posts so far cover war diaries, Royal Canadian Navy ledger sheets, the newly digitized Lord Elgin collection and more. Visit the LAC Blog here.

Friday, December 02, 2011 10:58:54 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Go here to search Ancestry.com's WWII records. When you go to view a match, you'll be prompted to set up a free registration with the site (or log in if you already have one).

2,459 Americans died when Japanese warplanes bombed Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941.

See the About.com Genealogy blog for more on records Ancestry.com added to its WWII collection for this promotion. Thanks to Kimberly for the heads-up on this news!

Friday, December 02, 2011 10:42:27 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

Researchers will be able to browse, view, and download images from the 1940 census. See NARA's full announcement here.

To kick off the partnership, Archives.com has created a web page about the launch of the 1940 Census.

You won't be able to search the census by name right away on April 2; instead, you'll need to know the enumeration district (ED) your relatives lived in and then browse the records for that district. You can find the ED if you know your ancestor's address in 1940 or in 1930.

Here's a post about an online tool that can help you determine the ED.

FamilySearch is heading up an effort to index the 1940 census records ASAP after they're released, which will let genealogists search by name.

Subscription website Ancestry.com also has announced plans to provide the 1940 census for free, at least through 2013.

Thursday, November 17, 2011 12:07:21 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [3]

The interface is similar to the previous viewer, with some new and improved features:

• Faster image loading.
  
  
• Works on more platforms and with more browsers than the previous image viewer, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Web browser issues were preventing a large portion of Ancestry.com members from using the previous image viewer.
  
  
• New tools, including rotating an image (handy for census returns with the address written along the side of the page), mirror (flips your record over so you're reading it backward, which I've heard can help with hard-to-read records), and new zoom controls.
  
  
• Easy installation. Most people won't have to install anything (I didn't), though you might need to install a more recent version of the free Adobe Flash Player.

To try out the new viewer, click on the options button at the top of the current image viewer:

and then select "Use the Advanced Viewer (Beta)"

Ancestry.com is collecting feedback from users who try the new viewer. Read more about the new features, see screenshots, and see the known issues on the Ancestry.com blog.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011 2:31:02 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [2]

FamilySearch has created a page to recruit volunteers for transcribing the 1940 census, scheduled for release April 2, 2012. (We’re just 146 days from 1940 census nirvana!) 

Unlike previous censuses, images of 1940 census records will be available free on the National Archives and Records Administration website. You won’t be able to search for an ancestor’s name right away; instead, you’ll have to browse the record by enumeration district (more on that—and figuring out your ancestor’s enumeration district—here). 

FamilySearch is coordinating a volunteer effort to index those images as soon as they’re released, so you’ll be able to search by name and click to see the record where the name appears.

If you want to help create the free, searchable 1940 census index, go here and sign up on the right side of this page.

Starting in mid-April, subscription website Ancestry.com also will begin streaming 1940 census records onto its website, where records will be free to search at least through 2013. 

Read more about the 1940 census, including what questions your ancestors had to answer, in our free article. 

Our Census Secrets CD, available from ShopFamilyTree.com, will help you find ancestors in US censuses from 1790 through 1940.

Tuesday, November 08, 2011 9:14:05 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [2]

The database is the first searchable collection resulting from the World Memory Project, a partnership of Ancestry.com and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The records contain information on thousands of individuals including displaced Jewish orphans; Czech Jews deported to the Terezin concentration camp and camps in occupied Poland; and French victims of Nazi persecution.

World Memory Project contributors use software from Ancestry.com to index museum records. The indexes are free to search on Ancestry.com. The museum retains the original records and provides free copies of them upon request. To date, more than 2,100 contributors from around the world have indexed almost 650,000 records.

Thursday, November 03, 2011 9:06:11 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [3]

• Subscription site Ancestry.com added 53 million new US birth, marriage and death records from 23 states dating as far back as the 1600s. 

The records come from state and local archives, county offices and newspapers.

Subscribers can search Ancestry.com's vital records collection at www.ancestry.com/vitals.

• The free FamilySearch.org added a variety of records from the California, Iowa, and Texas in the United States, as well as Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, Guam, Hungary, Japan and Wales.
  

Go here to view the new FamilySearch records and link to each one. Remember, where you see a "0" in the Records column and a number in the "Images" column, you're looking at a collection that hasn't yet been indexed. In that case, rather than type in a name to search, you'll need to browse through the record images in that collection.

Thursday, October 27, 2011 9:25:53 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [3]

A new database will be free each day, and stay free through Oct. 15. So far, you can search for free:

• Social Security Death Index (also free elsewhere online, including FamilySearch and RootsWeb)
  
• Griffith’s Valuation, 1848-1864, an important resource for Ireland
  
• California Marriage Index, 1960-1985
  
• WWI Personnel Rosters, 1914–1918, from Bavaria, Germany (records are in German)
  
• 1920 US Census
  
• Australian Electoral Rolls, 1903–1954

You also can enter to win daily prizes from Ancestry.com, culminating in a grand prize trip behind the scenes of the NBC show "Who Do You Think You Are?"

Go here to see Ancestry.com's daily free databases and enter the sweepstakes.

Thursday, October 06, 2011 9:04:13 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

Current Family Tree Maker users have been looking forward to the most-touted feature in the 2012 version: TreeSync, which lets users sync their trees in Family Tree Maker with their online trees at Ancestry.com—including attached photos and historical records.

“Now with the combination of Ancestry.com, the Ancestry mobile app and the new Family Tree Maker, users can work on their family tree anywhere, anytime,” says Eric Shoup, Ancestry.com's senior vice president of product.

Other improvements in Family Tree Maker 2012 include:

• easier user interface
  
  
• upgraded help content and video tutorials
  
  
• improved content-generation and editing options to create “Smart Stories” about family history and family members
  
  
• ability to combine families into one tree, bringing step families and adopted individuals into the main family tree
  
  
• simple generation labels and text boxes to make family trees more interesting and informative
  
  
• upgraded personalization capabilities in charts, letting users add their own images, adding narrative text and displaying explanatory generation labels
  
  
• ability to generate an index report of every person in a tree with birth, marriage and death dates
  
  
• ability to chart the line of descendancy between an ancestor and any descendant in the tree

Read more about the new version at the FamilyTreeMaker.com website. 

Family Tree Maker 2012 for PC starts at $39.99 and is available at FamilyTreeMaker.com, as well as retailers including Best Buy, Office Depot and Amazon.com. The new software comes with a free membership or free trial to the historical record collections at Ancestry.com, depending which package you purchase (you need internet access, of course, to access online features).

The next version of Family Tree Maker for Mac, when it’s released by the end of 2011, also will include the TreeSync capability.

Look for reviews of the new Family Tree Maker in an upcoming Family Tree Magazine.

Thursday, September 29, 2011 10:29:54 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

With nearly 13 million records, this census counted an estimated 90 percent of the population. Note that citizens from the Federal District, which includes Mexico City, aren’t named.

In its announcement, Ancestry.com calls this the most comprehensive historical Mexican census available online. (FamilySearch.org, the source of Ancestry.com’s index and images, also has the 1930 Mexico census records available in its free historical records search.)

Nearly 30 million Americans—about 10 percent of the US population—can trace their families to Mexico. Other Ancestry.com collections they can use to research their roots are border crossings from Mexico to the United States (1895-1957) and parish records. The records are gathered in a Mexico collection landing page. (The 1930 Mexican census is free to search, but not all the other records in the collection are free.)

If you’re researching ancestors in Mexico, check out these resources from Family Tree Magazine:

• Spanish Genealogy Glossary (free article)
  
  
• Hispanic genealogy organizations (free article)
  
  
• Mexican Heritage Research Guide digital download from ShopFamilyTree.com 
  
  
• Finding Your Mexican Ancestors: A Beginners Guide book by George R. Ryskamp and Peggy Hill Ryskamp, also available in ShopFamilyTree.com 

Friday, September 16, 2011 11:33:22 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [3]

As part of the effort, Archives.com reached an agreement with FamilySearch—the source of the census records—to dedicate a minimum of $5 million to digitizing genealogy records that are not currently online.

The indexes for all censuses are available now, as are images for the 1850, 1870 and 1900 censuses, for a total of more than 500 million names and 3 million images. The rest of the images will be added over the next weeks and months, says spokesperson Julie Hill. Learn more about the site's census collection on its census resource page.

The census search screen looks like this:

You can see it's more streamlined with fewer options than Ancestry.com's census search. You'll also receive fewer results—a search of all census years for the last name Haddad (not exact) living anywhere in the United States, born in Ohio between 1907 and 1911, netted me 30 matches on Archives.com and 63 on Ancestry.com. This might be good or bad for your research—it can be overwhelming to search through a flood of matches, but you also might lose some searching flexibility.

Here's a page of Archives.com search results:

When you click on a match, you first see this page displaying all the indexed fields:

Archives also is introducing a new, Flash-based image viewer that lets users zoom in, adjust contrast, invert colors and more (a basic image viewer will be an option for computers without Flash):

We’re thinking this is what Archives.com product director Joe Godfrey was referring to in May, when he opened the National Genealogical Society conference by announcing the site would “embark on an ambitious content acquisition and digitization plan, focusing in part on the digitization of material not yet online.” 

Anne Roach, who chaired FamilySearch’s 2011 RootsTech conference, joined Archives to lead the project.

The addition of the census will bring Archives.com, which launched in July 2009, into more-direct competition with industry leader Ancestry.com. Until Archives.com adds the rest of the census images, Ancestry.com is the only site providing access to all extant US census records and document images.

Archives.com will keep its subscription price at $39.95 "for the time being," says Hill. "That’s one-eighth the price of an Ancestry.com World membership. If you compare the subscriptions on a line-by-line basis, its remarkable how many high-value collections are available for one-eighth the price.”

Thursday, September 01, 2011 1:26:33 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [12]

The Ancestry.co.uk collection includes many of the same records: arrivals at US Atlantic and other ports, records of early US immigrations, US naturalizations, the Irish Emigrants in North America collection, etc. To see the list, go here and scroll down to the Included Data Collections box.

Click here to start searching the Ancestry.co.uk immigration collection.

Monday, August 29, 2011 8:41:17 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [6]

The collection includes arrivals at US Atlantic and other ports, records of early US immigrations, US naturalizations, the Irish Emigrants in North America collection and more. To see the list, go here and scroll down to the Included Data Collections box.

Click here to start searching the Ancestryco.uk immigration collection.

Monday, August 29, 2011 8:41:11 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [22]

• FamilySearch added to collections from seven countries, including 6 million record images from Mexico. Other additions include parish register records from Belgium and England, and church book records from Russia. New records were added from eight US states: Maryland, Montana, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia. Click through to the new and updated collections from here.
  

• UK family history site Genes Reunited has released a variety of military records from WW1 and the Second Anglo-Boer War. Collections include Royal Naval Officers' Medal Roll 1914-1920, New Zealand WWI Soldiers, Soldiers Died in the Great War 1914-1919, and records with 258,800 names of men and women who fought during the Second Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902.

• Subscription genealogy site Ancestry.com has expanded its US school yearbook collection, adding nearly 25,000 new yearbooks. It now totals more than 35,000 books with 155 million records from 1884 to 2009. The books come from high schools, junior highs, academies, colleges and universities. They're also are available on the Canadian-focused Ancestry.ca.

• Jill Barone of St. Petersburg, Fla., won the Red Star Line Museum's "Do You Know This Girl?" social media contest. Barone wins a trip to Antwerp, Belgium, for the official pre-opening festivities of the Red Star Line Museum in May 2012, and a $1,000 shopping spree at Diane Von Furstenberg's Antwerp boutique. The museum will open in spring 2013.

Friday, August 26, 2011 1:14:46 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [5]

The subscription genealogy website formerly known as Footnote.com will now be called Fold3.

Ancestry.com, which acquired the site along with its parent company, iArchives, last year, is rebranding it with the new name and a new focus on military-related content.

Historical military records have always been one of the site's strengths. The name Fold3 refers to the third fold of a flag in a traditional flag-folding ceremony, which is said to represent the sacrifices of military veterans.

Military records currently on Fold3 come from the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War and others.

“We have already begun expanding Fold3’s robust military collection to include new pension application files and draft cards,” says Brian Hansen, Fold3 general manager.

Don't worry—Footnote.com's nonmilitary records, such as city directories, naturalization documents, the Pennsylvania Archives collection and more, will remain on Fold3. Ancestry.com spokesperson Heather Erickson tells me they'll be in an “Other Collections” category.

Thursday, August 18, 2011 2:02:32 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

That’ll be more than 3.8 million images with 130 million records. Even better, they’ll be indexed by 45 fields, meaning you’ll be able to search on the name, street address, county, state, parents’ birthplaces and more.

The records won’t be on Ancestry.com right when the census is released April 2, 2012. Ancestry.com’s press release says they’ll commence “streaming onto the website in mid-April 2012.”

Can’t wait until mid-April? The record images will be available first on the National Archives’ website, but they won’t be searchable right away by name. Click here to see our post about finding your ancestors’ 1940 census enumeration district.

Get help with your census research—including preparing for the release of the 1940 census records—in the May 2010 Family Tree Magazine.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011 2:16:37 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [3]

• Congratulations to Lisa Louise Cooke, podcaster and blogger at Genealogy Gems (and Family Tree Magazine podcast host). Appadvice.com named Lisa’s Genealogy Gems Podcast app a must-have in the Hobby category of its AppList. Appadvice.com reviewers called it “a great resource for both amateur and professional Genealogists … The interface is easy to use and the type and controls are larger, making this application ideal even for older users.”

The Genealogy Gems podcast app features streaming of the Genealogy Gems podcast, plus show notes and bonus material. It’s available for the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad (at the iTunes store) and Android phone (in the Marketplace).

• FamilySearch added 4.3 million record images this week, nearly half of those to its Hungary Civil Registration, 1895–1980, collection (my husband is a quarter Hungarian, so this moves up his tree a few notches on my to-do list).
  

Other new records come from Austria, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Panama, and the US. Note these record images aren't yet indexed, so you'll need to browse them. See the updated collections and link to them from here.

• The California Genealogical Society and Ancestry.com are putting on an Ancestry Day Nov. 5 in San Francisco. It’ll include classes, Ancestry.com experts to answer your questions and one-on-one consultations with genealogists. The early bird price ends Oct. 5. You can register here. 

Friday, August 12, 2011 12:00:13 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [6]

• Genealogist Michael Hait has started the Ancestry Errors Wiki to keep track of the site’s “errors in imaging, programming or organization.” For example, one contributor noted that on Ancestry.com, “In the 1840 U. S. federal census, the city of Lexington, Fayette County, Kentucky, is incorrectly listed in Edmonson County, Ky.”

You can search the wiki or use a drop-down menu to find errors by state. Have you discovered such an error? Click here for instructions on adding a page to the wiki.

• Ancestry.ca now includes UK Railway Employment Records, 1833 – 1963, a collection containing the employment-related records of British railway workers dating back to the early 19th century. These records from the British national archives give employee names, home station, date of birth, information on their career progression, salary increases, rewards, conduct, and notes from superiors. Search the database here. 

• Switzerland genetics company iGENEA reconstructed Egyptian pharaoh King Tutankhamun's (aka King Tut) DNA profile based on a 2009 study of his DNA. The company determined King Tut belonged to the Y chromosome haplogroup R1b1a2, the most common Y-chromosome haplogroup in Western Europe—meaning half of all men in Europe are related to him.
  

But less than 1 percent of Egypt’s modern-day residents belong to this haplogroup, according to iGENEA, and it’s unknown how King Tut’s ancestors got to Egypt. The company is hoping its search for King Tut’s closest living male relatives will lead to an answer. If you order a test from iGENEA and match King Tut on 16 markers, the site promises your money back and a free upgrade. 

• The 31st annual International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) conference starts next Sunday, Aug. 14, in Washington, DC. Online registration is closed, but you can register on-site. Click here for more information. 

Friday, August 05, 2011 1:06:05 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4]

Through July 4, you can search SAR applications dating from 1889 to 1970 free on Ancestry.com. (After you hit Search, you’ll be prompted to set up a free account to view your results.) The collection includes 145,000 applications.

Click here to start your search (then select the Free Access Weekend logo on the right).

Thursday, June 30, 2011 11:27:29 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [5]

This beautiful certificate was for Walter C. Peck of Cleveland, Ohio, and Irene E. Kershner of Berwick, Pa., who were married on July 5, 1924, in Berwick, Pa., by the Rev. H.R. Shipe. I just had to know if this marriage certificate had a family that would want it.

So I did a little genealogical detective work on Ancestry.com.

(Click the image to enlarge it)

I found a Walter (age 31) and Irene Peck (29) living at 1273 Bonnieview, Lakewood, Ohio, in the 1930 census (recorded on April 5, 1930). They had two children, Clarke (5) and Carlos (8 months), and Walter was a ticket agent for a steam railroad. They rented their home for $50 a month and owned a radio set.

But Irene also showed up listed with her parents, William and Sarah Kershner, at 373 Monroe, Berwick Township, Pa., on the 1930 census (recorded April 8, 1930). Her two sons, Clark (listed as 4 and 11 months) and Carlos (7 months), are also included. (I'm figuring they were visiting during enumeration time.) I found the Kershners at the same address in the 1910 census, with Irene, 10 at the time, being among seven listed children.

Irene pops up in the 1920 census as a sister-in-law to Jacob and Lucretia Nagel in Lakewood, Ohio. She worked as a stenographer at a chemical company.

A WWI draft registration card filled out June 5, 1918, for a Walter Clark Peck living at 1339 E. 80th St. in Cleveland states he worked at a chemical company in Cleveland -- perhaps Walter and Irene had a workplace romance. Walter's emergency contact was his mother, Elizabeth Peck, who lived at the same address. Walter shows up on the 1910 and 1920 censuses living with his parents, Clark W. and Bessie Peck, in Cleveland.

Ohio death records show Walter C. Peck, born in 1897, died at home in Fairview Park, Ohio, on Nov. 13, 1961. I couldn't find a death date for Irene; Carlos Peck passed away in 2002.

But Clark Peck is still alive, and I called him on the phone today. He's a bit hard of hearing, so I mostly spoke to his wife, Beryl (Heiser) Peck, who confirmed pretty much everything I'd found.

Beryl said Walter Peck and Irene Kershner had met at Grasselli Chemical in Cleveland, where they'd both worked. Walter later worked for the Canadian Pacific Rail for many years; Beryl said Walter traveled around the world a couple times before he passed away in his 60s. Irene lived until the last 1980s. Now in his late 80s, Dr. Clark Peck practiced dentistry and taught at Case Western Reserve University for 30 years. He and Beryl now live in Westlake, Ohio, and have two children and many grandchildren.

By the time I got off the phone, I was tearing up from happiness. Beryl thanked me multiple times for contacting them -- I'll be mailing out the marriage certificate (and a copy of this blog post) to her and Clark today. I'm so glad that this beautiful record will return to its family -- and stay with them for many years to come.

• Lisa Louise Cooke's Reverse Genealogy class
• Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness website
• Reverse Genealogy Independent Study class
• "Switching Gears" by Maureen A. Taylor (Plus article)
• Research Remedies CD

Thursday, June 16, 2011 2:49:24 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [11]

• The Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree is going on now in Burbank, Calif. Visit the Geneabloggers blog for links to the latest blog posts and tweets about the conference. 

• GenDetective, a trip-planning and reporting tool for genealogists (see our initial report about GenDetective here), is now available for download as a 10-day free trial or for purchase. 

• The Red Star Line Museum (set to open in 2013) and its hometown of Antwerp, Belgium, are trying to identify a young passenger in one of the museum’s photographs. The "Do You Know This Girl?" campaign has a blog, Facebook page and a contest you can enter to win a trip for two to Belgium. See the mystery photo and learn more about the "Do You Know This Girl?" campaign here. 

• The National Archives is holding a “I Found it in the National Archives” contest from now until Aug. 9. Just submit an essay or video about an important document you discovered at a National Archives facility. See how to enter and get the contest rules on Archives.gov. 

• Ancestry.com and the Allen County (Ind.) Public Library Genealogy Center are holding an Ancestry Day genealogy fair in Fort Wayne, Ind., July 22-23. You can consult with experts from Ancestry.com and attend classes on using the site. Registration costs $20. Learn more on the Genealogy Center’s blog. 

• Manassas, Va., is commemorating the 150th anniversary of the First Battle of Manassas (also called Bull Run) with an event July 21-24 featuring battle re-enactments, living history demonstrations and more, including an appearance by Patrick Gorman (Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood in the 2003 film Gods and Generals). Learn more and purchase tickets at ManassasCivilWar.org. 

Friday, June 10, 2011 10:02:14 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• The new iPhone app BillionGraves.com (1BGraves) lets you contribute to the site’s gravestone image database while on the road. Even without the app, you can add transcriptions to the site's online database. On the site, you can search gravestone records by person or cemetery (it looks like few stones are recorded yet, but you can find cemeteries listed with maps showing their locations).

• The entire 1930 Mexico Census is now complete on FamilySearch. This indexing project started in September2007 and encompassed 13 million records. 

• Here’s an update on a smaller genealogy subscription site you may not be familiar with: Family Tree Connection, launched in 2003, is approaching 2 million records. The names were transcribed from more than 5,400 documents including Masonic lodge rosters, military rosters, insurance claims, tax lists, orphanage records, club and society member lists, prisoner logs and mug shots, school catalogs, yearbooks, railroad employee information, rural telephone directories, church member lists and more.
  

• Ancestry.com has added new US WWII Navy Muster Rolls (1938-1949) and a US Navy Cruise Books Index (1918-2009) to its military records collection.

• Among the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s (NEHGS) upcoming events is Come Home to New England, a weeklong educational event featuring research opportunities, individual research consultations, lectures and more. It takes place June 13-18 at NEHGS’s Boston headquarters. Learn more on the NEHGS website. 

Friday, May 27, 2011 9:30:35 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [2]

• We’re hearing there's great attendance at this year’s conference, and that the first two days in the exhibit hall were crowded.
  

• The 2012 NGS conference is May 9-12 in Cincinnati (also the hometown of Family Tree Magazine) and the 2013 conference will be in Las Vegas.

• FamilySearch has set an annual goal to add 200 million record images to its free online records search. Its 2012 RootsTech conference will be Feb. 2-4 in Salt Lake City.

• Archivist of the United States David Ferrerio, speaking at the NGS opening session, said that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is digitizing the 1940 census in-house and it’ll be available—but not yet indexed by name—on on NARA's website April 2, 2012. It won’t be on any commercial websites on that date.

• Ancestry.com will begin indexing the census records as soon as they’re available and will post the indexed records online later in the year, the company announced at a conference reception.
  

Dick Eastman has posted his copious notes from the reception. Some things that caught my eye: the new genealogy Web Search, US Navy Ship Muster Rolls 1939-1949 (coming on Memorial Day), more US birth and death records, a faster record image viewer, a new Android app, and the ability to download data from your Ancestry tree to version 2012 Family Tree Maker software.

• See this GeneaBloggers post for the latest NGS-related tweets and blog posts.
  

Friday, May 13, 2011 4:14:05 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

For Web Search, Ancestry.com will index other genealogy web sites. When you do a search on Ancestry.com, if there’s a relevant match in a record on a site that’s been indexed, that match will be included in your search results along with the historical records on Ancestry.com. Web Search will be a free service.

Here’s what a Web Search result looks like (image, arrows and callouts are Ancestry.com's).

So you can tell which records in your search results are from Ancestry.com and which are from another site, you’ll see an icon and the word “Web” in front of the name of the collection.

The Web Search results include the essential information from the other site (theoretically, enough to help you decide whether the record refers to your ancestor) and a link to visit the website.

“In the same way you should always check the image when you look at an index, make sure you go to the web site to see what other information is there,” advises Ancestry.com in its announcement. “You will usually find additional information.”

You also can click to save the information to your tree.

You don’t have to subscribe or have a guest account with Ancestry.com to use Web Search or get to the source website. But if you want to save the web record to your online tree, you’ll of course need at least a guest account. 

Webmasters who don’t want their genealogy websites indexed in Web Records will be able to contact Ancestry.com and opt out.

See more details and a Q&A on Ancestry.com’s Web Search info page. 

Many genealogists see Web Search as Ancestry.com’s shot at a do-over of its Internet Biographical Collection, which was pulled down shortly after its introduction in August 2007 amid negative feedback over copyright and other concerns. More on that in this post. 

Friday, May 13, 2011 12:37:14 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

Volunteers will build an index to the museum’s archives, which hold information on more than 17 million people targeted by the Nazis, including Jews, Poles, Roma, Ukrainians, political prisoners and others.

Ancestry.com will donate the indexing software and project management, and will host the completed indexes, which will be free to search. Holocaust survivors and their families can contact the museum to obtain copies of original documents at no cost.

Since launching the project in beta in February, Ancestry.com contributors have already indexed over 30,000 of the museum’s archival documents, which will soon be searchable free on Ancestry.com.

People from anywhere in the world can help index the remaining records by visiting www.WorldMemoryProject.org and registering to become a contributor.

Tuesday, May 03, 2011 10:15:53 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Griffiths Valuation, 1847-1864: Over 2.5 million records that provide a snapshot of ancestors who rented land or property throughout Ireland in the 1850s
• Tithe Applotment Books, 1824-1837: In 1823, a law was enacted requiring all land holders to pay a tithe to the Church of Ireland, regardless of their religious affiliation. With details like tithe payer, acreage of their land and amount of their tithe, these 600,000 records in effect provide a census of pre-famine Ireland.
• Ordnance Survey Maps, 1824-1846: The first detailed mapping of Ireland undertaken during the 1830s and 1840s, the later part of which was produced during the height of the famine.
• Lawrence Collection, 1870-1910: This collection of 20,000 photographs showcases the length and breadth of Ireland, through the eyes of William Lawrence's photography studio in Dublin.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011 1:06:22 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [4]

Once again, the Who Do You Think You Are? Live show in London attracted thousands of eager visitors anxious to learn more about their family tree. It was my great pleasure to not only participate as a speaker this year, but also to report on the event for the Genealogy Insider.

The exhibition hall was packed for WDYTYA? Live.

According to Else Churchill, genealogist for the Society of Genealogists in the UK and organizer of the society’s workshops at the event, BBC Magazines Bristol has purchased a major share of the show from Brand Events, who has organized it for the last five years. The new owners will be managing the event from this point forward, and they are already busy making big plans.

I was very excited to bring a technology topic to the event with my Make Google Work Harder for Your Family History workshop. On the heels of RootsTech, WDYTYA? Live will be looking toward technology and social media and their role in genealogy, expanding those topic areas next year.

Lisa teaching her Google workshop at WDYTYA? Live.

Churchill and her team worked tirelessly to organize the Society of Genealogists workshops, and their Ask the Expert booth, spearheaded by Lori Weinstein, was a big hit once again. I participated in a 2 hour shift on Saturday and thoroughly enjoyed working one on one with eager attendees.

Visitors also really appreciated the expanded gallery area upstairs and from what I could see, they made very good use of it. They found more room to roam in the military and photographic exhibit areas, plenty of tables and seating (where my husband and I held an impromptu family reunion with three other distant British Cooke cousins!), and even a pasty pie stand (which, of course, I felt obligated to taste test – yummy!).

One of the unique aspects of WDYTYA? Live is the inclusion of celebrities profiled on the BBC TV series "Who Do You Think You Are?" Monty Don ("Gardener’s World"), Hugh Quarshie ("Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace"), and celebrity chef Ainsley Harriott kept audiences riveted as they recounted their personal family history journey.

Additional News:

• The British Library announced its digitization of the India Collections
• Deceased Online has added Scottish MIs
• FindMyPast.co.uk will be adding transcriptions of Scottish census records only
• The Genealogists is adding war memorials
  
  

Ancestry.com scanning booth

Lisa with Photo Detective Maureen A. Taylor.

Association of Scottish Genealogists and Researchers in Archives booth

Lisa interviews a representative of the Western Front Association.

Wednesday, March 02, 2011 9:14:25 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

Each journalist on the call got to ask two or three questions. When our turn came, we wanted to know whether Kudrow and Williams would have pursued genealogy to such an extent themselves, had they not been on “WDYTYA?”

Williams, who learns on the show that her African-American ancestors served in the Civil War and in the Tennessee legislature after Emancipation, is a bit of a history buff and had actually already set up a family tree on Ancestry.com (a partner in the series). She had the interest, she said, but not the necessary knowledge or access to the information.

Kudrow’s dad was way into in genealogy, as you might remember from last season’s "WDYTYA?," and had spent a lot of time at the FamilySearch Center in Los Angeles. He had a many names and dates, and Kudrow was able to flesh out that information and get in touch with living relatives through the show.

We also mentioned how hungry Family Tree Magazine readers are to see more of what goes into the research—how researchers uncover the records, what archives they visit, what the records look like—and asked whether this year we might see more of that detail in the episodes or even on the "WDYTYA?" website.

Kudrow acknowledged your desire to know more of the nuts and bolts of the research. Earlier in the call, she had noted how painful it is to have to cut video from each episode due to the 42-minute running time. “There just isn’t time,” she lamented.

So you probably won’t see much more nuts-and-bolts research in the episodes, but we’re hoping NBC will put more of that behind-the-scenes content on the website. Ancestry.com posted research recaps to its blog after each Season One episode, so we'll look for more of those, as well.

Thomas MacEntee of Genea-bloggers also was on the call—see the answers to his questions and other notes from the call here. Lisa Louise Cooke of Genealogy Gems was there, too—keep an eye on her blog for her take. 

Kudrow talked about the value of personalizing history with stories like those featured on the show. You might think history was just something that happened to strangers a long time ago, but when you see how it affected your family, it has so much more impact.

“I hope it’s a history lesson for people, and I hope it inspires them to ask questions,” Williams said.

"WDYTYA?" premieres Friday, Feb. 4, at 8pm EST on NBC.

Monday, January 24, 2011 4:23:22 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [3]

The records, dating from 1500 to 1937, comprise nearly 18 million images scanned from microfilm and microfiche of the original church records. The collection includes births, baptisms, marriages, deaths, burials, household examinations (akin to censuses), parish books, moving-ins and moving-outs.

You can learn more about these records here. 

Wednesday, January 12, 2011 2:59:24 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Ancestry.com says its users asked for more flexibility in entering place and date information: What if you don’t know when and where an ancestor was born—but you do know he lived in a certain place at a certain time?

So you’ll soon be able to enter a place into a “Name a place your ancestor might have lived” field. That will search Ancestry.com records for any life events—birth, residence, marriage, military service and death—that match that location. User testing revealed this moved relevant matches up in search results, says Ancestry.com product manager Anne Mitchell.

The new form also adds a “Calculate it” button, which will estimate a birth year based on when your ancestor lived in the place you specify.

If you do know when your ancestor was born, married, died, served in the military or lived someplace else, you can click an “Add an event” link to add one of these life events and the place and date of that event.

Finally, the links to clear the form and show the Advanced Search form have moved to the bottom of the Basic Search form, next to the Search button.

The changes will begin rolling out to some US members today and become available to all users over the next few weeks.

Visit Ancestry.com’s blog for more information and to see what the new form looks like.

Thursday, December 09, 2010 10:09:12 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

In subscription site Ancestry.com’s new database of Sears catalogs from 1896 to 1993, I couldn’t resist browsing the early 1980s doorstoppers of my childhood. As a kid, I’d "shop," choosing one item per page, and use the toy sections to create impossibly optimistic Christmas lists.

But for genealogical purposes, you’ll probably want to look at catalogs further back in time. Of course, you won’t find ancestors. But if your family farmed in the 1940s, for example, you can keyword-search catalogs from that era for equipment they might’ve used. If you fondly remember Grandma making cakes with her rotary egg beater, you can learn when she might've bought it and see an illustration. This one cost 30 cents in the Fall 1929 edition:

Need to date a photo? Search the catalog database for the dress style or an object in the photo. I entered shirtwaist, and among the results was this illustration from the Spring 1905 catalog:

Your searches find keywords in the catalogs’ product descriptions, so you may have to experiment with search terms to find a drawing that matches what’s in your photograph.

The Ancestry.com blog suggests using the catalog pages to spark stories and reminisce with relatives—another handy way to gather family clues. 

You can learn about the history of the Sears catalog, which began as a simple mailer in 1888 and has been called one of the most-commonly read books in rural areas, on the Sears website.

Wednesday, December 01, 2010 9:19:26 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

• Congratulations to Lisa Louise Cooke on the 100th episode of her Genealogy Gems podcast! This special episode celebrates the first 100 with a look at some of Lisa's favorite gems, interviews and milestones, plus some messages from listeners.

• Season 2 of Brigham Young University's genealogy show, "The Generations Project," airs Monday, Jan. 3 at 7 pm Mountain time on BYUtv. You can stream the channel online, or look for it on cable for your area. Learn more about the show on its website.

• FamilySearch Beta has added or updated 34 collections of genealogical records—that’s 15 million indexed records and 2.5 million images. The information covers 13 countries: Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Jamaica, Canada and the United States. Click here to see a list of the new/updated collections. 

• New York’s Larchmont Historical Society has created an online Photo Index of Fallen World War I Soldiers from New York State. The images, digitized from the book Soldiers of the Great War, don’t show all the state’s fallen soldiers, including those whose photos weren't available and those who grew up in New York but enlisted elsewhere. You can read more about the site and get search tips from the ResearchBuzz blog. 

• The New England Historic Genealogical Society is holding a technology-focused Weekend Research Getaway Jan. 27 to 29, 2011. The weekend will combine guided research at the NEHGS Research Library in Boston with educational lectures about using technology in your family search. Registration costs $300, or you can buy a day pass. See the program and register at AmericanAncestors.org.
  

• Ancestry.com and National Geographic Digital Media have developed an online family history “experience” on the National Geographic Genographic Project website where visitors can learn more about researching genealogy and search their roots. They’ll be able to start an online family tree, get tips on doing family history, and links to Ancestry.com’s subscription record collections. The Genographic Project is a DNA study of the genetic makeup of populations around the world in order to chart the migration history of the human species.

Friday, November 19, 2010 12:27:58 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Sometime tomorrow (Thursday, Nov. 18), you’ll start to notice new options for the date fields on subscription site Ancestry.com’s search form.

The coming changes will add an “Add an Event” link to the current birth and death date fields in the search form. Click that link, and you can use a pulldown menu select a type of event—marriage, military service, “lived in,” arrival or departure (the last two are in reference to immigration)—and then enter the year the event occurred.

In search forms for collections in which exact dates are indexed, including vital records databases and the Social Security death index, you’ll be able to enter a day, month and year for birth, marriage and/or death. Some forms also will get an “any event” date field you can use to type in the year of any life event that might be included in a record.

You can get more details and see what the updated search forms will look like on Ancestry.com’s blog.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010 4:04:24 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

You'll be able to search the records free this weekend: Also for Veterans Day, Ancestry.com is making its military records collection free from Nov. 11-14. 

The West Point Application Papers include applicants’ letters dating from 1805 to 1866 requesting appointment, War Department letters of recommendation and notification if the candidate was accepted, and letters of acceptance from the candidate.

More than 115,000 candidates are named; they include well-known West Point graduates who went on to military careers, such as

• William Tecumseh Sherman, who became a Union general in the Civil War
  
  
• Thomas J. Jackson, a Confederate commander who was nicknamed “Stonewall” at the Battle of Chancellorsville
  
  
• George Pickett, who resigned from the US Army in 1861 to serve for the Confederacy, and led Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg
  
  
• George Custer, who joined the Union Army after graduating last in his class at West Point

Wednesday, November 10, 2010 2:57:00 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Ancestry.com searching: Search subscription genealogy site Ancestry.com from Family Tree Maker and merge historical records and information you find into Family Tree Maker. You'll need an Ancestry.com subscription to view most search results; the software comes with either a free trial or subscription to Ancestry.com, depending which you opt to purchase.
• Multimedia support: You can add photos, documents, audio, video and other media files to the people in your tree. Tools let you scan photos and document images right into your tree.
• Family books, charts and reports: A strength of Family Tree Maker is the ability to publish attractive family tree charts and books.
• Slideshows: Create slideshows from photos in your tree
• Source citation: Standard source templates and other tools to help you cite sources.
• Migration information: Timelines and interactive maps help you visualize family migrations and other events.

Thursday, November 04, 2010 9:15:06 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [2]

Maybe you can. State and local archives and libraries, town halls, and the Family History Library (FHL) may have town or county lists of registered voters or those who paid poll taxes.

Search your ancestral state archives website for voting, and try running a keyword search of the FHL online catalog on the town, county or state name and the word voting. You can rent promising microfilm by visiting your local FamilySearch Center. Subscription website Ancestry.com has some voting-related records and digitized books, so if you’re a member, run the same search of its online catalog.

Here are some examples of the records you can find for various states and counties:

• Every four years from 1803 to 1911, Ohio counted men age 21 and older in various counties to determine voting districts. These quadrennial enumerations are on FHL microfilm and in some local genealogical society collections. An 1863 list of Fallsbury Township voters is part of RootsWeb's free Tax and Voter lists search.
  

• Chicago voter records, which can help you substitute for the missing 1890 census, are available for 1888, 1888 to 1890, and 1892, at the FHL, as is a 1937 voter registration list. Lists for 1888, 1890 and 1892 are on Ancestry.com.
  

• Ancestry.com also has a list of registered voters in New York in 1880, as well as digitized books of poll lists for 1761 and 1765.

• California's "Great Registers" are county voting registers compiled roughly every two years. Early registers included naturalization data and even physical descriptions. The state library has registers from 1866 to 1898 and 1900 to 1944, and reisters from 1900 to 1968 are on subscription site Ancestry.com. They’re also on microfilm by county at the FHL.

• Arizona has similar Great Registers, located at the Arizona State Library and on FHL microfilm.

• In Kansas, members of the New England Emigrant Aid Society are thought to have settled the area in order to influence voting on the slavery issue. A list of those individuals and the territorial citizens deemed eligible to vote in 1856 is free on the Kansas GenWeb site.
  

• The Wyoming state archives’ collection includes poll lists for various counties (type voting into the search box on the home page). You’ll find voting lists for part of Fremont County from 1907 to 1913 on microfiche at the FHL.

• Massachusetts towns kept lists of freemen (landowning men of legal age, usually 21 but as young as 16) who were eligible to vote. An 1890 list of poll tax payers for the town of Maynard is part of RootsWeb's free database of tax and voter lists. The state library has voting lists along with city directories in its special collections.

Tuesday, November 02, 2010 9:16:08 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [2]

This weekend's free Ancestry.ca records include:

• Paris, France records, featuring more than 200 years of birth, marriage and death records

• Marne, and Saone-et-Loire, France, birth, marriage and death collections, which feature vital records spanning nearly 400 years 

• Upper Brittany, France, records collection, including rare immigration and military records, as well as vital records dating back to the early 1500s

• Marseilles, France Marriages, 1810-1915, with nearly half a million records

You can see the French records collection and access the free databases (starting Saturday, Oct. 30) at <ancestry.ca/toussaint>. (You’ll need to set up a free registration with the site to view your search results.)

All Saints Day, Nov. 1 in Western Christianity, is a celebration of all the saints. It’s sometimes called All Hallows or Hallowmas. The night before, or “All Hallows Even,” is believed to provide the origin for the word Halloween.

You'll find a French-Canadian genealogy research guide in the June 2006 Family Tree Magazine, available as a digital download from ShopFamilyTree.com.

Thursday, October 28, 2010 4:57:02 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

"You may be curious about how this deal affects members of Footnote.com? The plan is to continue to run Footnote.com the way we have always run Footnote.com—continuing to do what we believe is best for our brand, our customers, and our business."

Thursday, October 21, 2010 9:59:28 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [2]

You can see a demo of how Ancestry Labs works here. Leave feedback by using the green Feedback tab on the left side of the Ancestry Labs site.

“The projects we place in this area are likely to be early prototypes, and although some of them may make their way into the main Ancestry.com site, some may not,” reads Ancestry.com’s announcement.

The first idea at Ancestry Labs, called “Person View,” includes two components: 

• Web Records: This feature searches for your ancestor on the internet, shows you basic information (name, date and place) from web pages mentioning your ancestor, and links you to those pages. Sites searched include free databases such as the Western States Marriage Record Index. In a demo in August, project manager Brian Hansen said Ancestry.com is attempting to avoid duplication by not searching the same collections that are already included in Ancestry.com databases.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Ancestry.com offered a similar search in the maligned Internet Biographical Collection, which was pulled down shortly after its introduction in August 2007 amid copyright and other concerns. The difference is that the Internet Biographical Collection actually cached web pages’ content and displayed the results on Ancestry.com, so traffic wasn’t directed to the site and the content’s creator wasn’t credited. 

Ancestry.com is hoping to avoid the same mistakes with the new Web Records view. “In providing access to these, it’s very important to us that we are respectful to the publishers of these websites,” the announcements says. “We will always strive to follow web industry standards for website crawling permissions ... We will put in place processes to remove the content from our search if the website/content owner requests, with the goal of doing this as quickly as possible. We will clearly publish how to contact our team to do this.”

• Person Consolidation: This way of viewing Ancestry.com search results groups matches by person, rather than just listing each result. The search algorithm decides whether records are for one person, and your results show a person’s name with links to categories of records—Ancestry Records, Family Trees (with no living people included) and Web Records—for that person. Click one of those links to see more links to view each record in that category. The search results also list a person’s family members, and you can click these names to see that family member’s records. 

Person View gives you just the first 10 matches to your search. The advantage is that it Person View simplifies your search results, but the algorithm can make mistakes by grouping together records for two different people, or displaying one person as two different people.

Here’s my first PersonView search for Henry Seeger:

And the first match, which consolidates content about Henry Seeger from 15 Ancestry.com family trees (no Ancestry Records or Web Records were found for this Henry). It lists people the search engine believes to be in Henry's family (I'd have to look at each tree and decide whether I think they're all really related to Henry). Clicking on a name, such as Henry’s son Charles, will perform a new search for that person.

Clicking on Henry’s name brings up a timeline of events from those trees, with a little map showing places mentioned in the trees: 

Links on the right bring up information about each tree and let you save the event to your tree:

If your matches contain Ancestry Records, the timeline will link to information from the record (a WWI Draft Registration card, in the case below, was the source for a February, 1873 birth date): 

Web Record matches bring up similar basic information, with a link to the site that has the record (you can't yet save Web Records to your Ancestry tree): 

Click Comments to let us know what you think of Ancestry Labs and Person View.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010 8:06:23 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [3]

• If you can’t find your ancestors in the 1910 US census on subscription site Ancestry.com, you might want to give it another try. Ancestry.com has updated the collection with new images and an improved index that includes more alternate names. The updated index combines the old index with a new one keyed from the new images. Read more on the Ancestry.com blog.
  

• BackupMyTree, the free genealogy file back-up service that debuted last month, has added support for Reunion for Mac. Although the BackupMyTree software still works with only Windows, users of any operating system can manually upload files—now including Reunion files—through their web browser. Next week, BackupMyTree will add support for The Master Genealogist software, as well as a feature that allows users to include and exclude files in bulk.

• Genetic genealogy testing company GeneTree is offering two new services designed to help you maximize your genetic genealogy testing efforts. If you buy a DNA Makeover report ($14.95), GeneTree staff will translate your Y-chromosome or mitochondrial DNA results from another lab into a GeneTree profile. For the Family Tree Diagnostic Service (also $14.95), a GeneTree consultant will review your family tree to find relatives you should consider having tested and what tests they should take to help you achieve your research objectives.

• Leland Meitzler, organizer of the Salt Lake Christmas Tour annual research trip to Salt Lake City, announced that genealogy technology and social networking expert Thomas MacEntee will present eight classes during this year’s tour. A few topics are Building a Research Toolbox, Facebook for Genealogists, Build a Genealogy Blog, and Twitter: It Isn’t Just “What I Had For Breakfast” Anymore. The tour takes place Dec. 5 through 11, and you can register here. 

• The Pennsylvania State Archives will close from Monday, Oct. 18 through Feb. 3 of next year for renovations. The $250,000 project will expand and modernize the lobby and public research areas. (Plans are still in place, though, to eventually replace the facility, which has water leaks and lacks environmental controls and fire suppression system.) Staff will continue to respond to telephone, e-mail and postal inquiries during the closure. You can download the press release as a PDF from the archives’ website.
  

• Remember to register for our free, beginner-oriented 10 Steps to Discover Your Roots webinar, taking place tomorrow (Saturday, Oct. 16) at 2 pm Eastern Time. You’ll get a confirmation e-mail with a link to log in and instructions on how to participate in the webinar. (I suggest logging in several minutes ahead of time in case your computer needs to make any updates to watch the webinar.)

Friday, October 15, 2010 3:39:31 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Allison Stacy, Family Tree Magazine’s publisher and editorial director, fills you in on Family History Month events

• Genealogy expert James M. Beidler provides history and research tips from his article "Trace Your Scots-Irish Roots" in the December 2010 Family Tree Magazine. 

• Get started paring down your collection of papers with tips from online editor Grace Dobush on what to keep and what to toss.

• Lisa and I talk about Ancestry.com's acquisition of iArchives, Footnote.com’s parent company, and some questions genealogists are asking.

• Researcher and author Lisa A. Alzo gives you tips for exploring your ancestor’s international origins from her Family Tree University class Tracing Immigrants: How to Research Your Family’s American Arrivals.
  

You can listen to the Family Tree Magazine Podcast in iTunes and on FamilyTreeMagazine.com. You can get the show notes on our website, too.

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Wednesday, October 13, 2010 1:41:35 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• FamilySearch.org recently added 5 million new indexed names and images to its free databases. These 48 new and updated collections come from 19 different countries, including the first records from Nicaragua and Sri Lanka. Also included are church and civil registration record from Brazil; baptism, marriage and death records from Canada; Swedish church records; vital, tax and other records from the United States; and more. You can search the records at FamilySearch beta.

• I came across a website called Tools of History, a collaborative digitization project for historical manuscripts, photographs, maps, drawings, books and artifacts from south central New York State. Among the collection sare photos of the Daughters of Charity at Lourdes Hospital, Atlases of Chemung County and something intriguing called the “murder pamphlet collection” (looks to be old books, letters, sermons and other accounts of cases in the area). Definitely a site worth exploring if you have ancestors there.

• Ancestry.com has introduced a new feature called Suggested Records that, well, suggests records for you to check. The suggested records list is being tested on results pages in the 1900 census and the WWI draft registration collections.

If the record you’re viewing has been saved to any member family trees, the list will suggest other records have been saved to the same nodes on those member trees. Randy Seaver takes a close look at Suggested Records on his Genea-Musings blog.

Friday, September 17, 2010 3:52:41 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Best websites for British Isles researchers (free article)
• English Roots Online Toolkit (free article)
• British Genealogy Guide Digital Download (from ShopFamilyTree.com)

Thursday, August 12, 2010 12:20:23 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• How to navigate Ancestry.com
• Tricks for finding databases with the genealogical information you need
• Strategies to locate hard-to-find ancestors in the site’s record collections
• Things Ancestry.com doesn't want you to know!

• Participation in the live presentation and Q&A session
• Access to the webinar recording to view again as many times as you like
• PDF of the presentation slides for future reference
• Bonus handouts

Thursday, July 22, 2010 8:37:48 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Ancestry.com has completed its acquisition of Genline.se, the leading Swedish family history Web site. Ancestry.com acquired all shares of Genline for approximately 53 million Swedish kronor, about $7.2 million.

• Ancestry.com also has updated its New Search screen to add maps you can click to browse data collections associated with a state or county, as well as access to your recent searches and recently viewed data collections. To use these features, click the search tab on Ancestry.com’s home page (if you see a New Search link in the upper right, be sure to click it—these updates aren’t in the old search). See more details and screen shots on the Ancestry.com blog.

• Historical newspaper subscription site GenealogyBank has added new content from 186 newspapers in 40 US states. You can view the titles that have been added or expanded on GenealogyBank.com (starred titles with have the just-added content). GenealogyBank’s search page has a dropdown menu that lets you search just new content: 

• British subscription site FindMyPast.co.uk has made it easier for you to find birth records on the site. More than 100 million records were re-indexed.  Now, your search results will be in a list of individual names, rather than a range, so you won’t have to view pages and pages of records in order to find your ancestor. In the advanced search, you can now search records from one or more counties. Search FindMyPast.co.uk birth records here. Fully indexed marriage and death records should follow later this year.

• Subscription site Ancestry.ca has launched 16.3 million Parisian birth, marriage and death records dating from 1700 to 1907. French is the second most common ancestry in Canada. Use these links to access the records:

Paris, France & Vicinity Marriages, 1700-1907
Paris, France & Vicinity Births, 1700-1899
Paris, France & Vicinity Deaths, 1707-1907

Friday, July 16, 2010 1:58:26 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

• Family Tree University Land Records course (this self-paced course starts this week and run for a month, but you can still register until the end of the week)

• Family Tree Essentials CD, available from ShopFamilyTree.com

• August 2006 Family Tree Magazine digital issue, also  available from ShopFamilyTree.com

Monday, June 21, 2010 1:38:46 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• 10 best websites for military research
• Military records toolkit
• Four resources for military ancestors
• Common abbreviations in military records
• Civil War genealogy toolkit
• WWI genealogy resources
• Military Records category of this Genealogy Insider blog
  

• Online Military Records: Document Your Family's Service webinar recording
• May 2008 Family Tree Magazine with our guide to online military records
• July 2007 Family Tree Magazine (available as a PDF digital download) with our Civil War research guide
• The Everything Civil War Book By Brooke C. Stoddard and Daniel P. Murphy, PhD

Wednesday, May 26, 2010 10:13:00 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4]

• more prominent browsing by place (right down to a county, which got applause from the audience), record category and collection
  
  
• a simplified basic search form that asks for name and place of residence (it includes a calculator to help you determine a birth year based on your ancestor’s age at a specific time)
  
  
• pages with historical information and basic facts about counties, as well as additional resources outside of Ancestry.com.

Thursday, April 29, 2010 12:21:25 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [3]

• A new search home page that includes a clickable map, links to content categories, and other features to help you find the databases you're looking for.

• Changes to the basic and advanced search forms that should give you more control over your search results. According to the announcement, some changes will be introduced this week and others are in development.

• A way to browse for databases by country, state or county.

• New ways to track your recent searches and recently browsed collections.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010 3:25:15 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• The second week of NBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are?” increased its viewership by 13 percent in adults age 18 to 49, and 4 percent in total viewers. The show finished in the ratings within a tenth of a point of first place for the 8/7 central time slot in adults age 18 to 49, and is tied for No. 1 among the major networks in adults age 18 to 34.

Tune in to tonight’s episode as Lisa Kudrow searches for her roots in Belarus.

• The UK’s General Register Office (GRO) has announced a restructuring of its charges for ordering birth, marriage and death records. Starting April 6, you’ll select from two instead of eight options, so it’s simpler, but the fees for standard service are going up from  £7.00 to £9.25 (about $10.60 to $14). See the GRO website for more information. 

• Luckie Daniels at the blog Our Georgia Roots is hosting the first edition of the Carnival of African-American Genealogy, themed “Restore My Name: Slave Records & Genealogy Research.” Click here to read Daniels’ entry and follow her links to participating bloggers' carnival posts.
  

• Ancestry.com is offering a free webinar about using Family Tree Maker 2010. It’s May 19, 8 pm EDT (thanks to the person who commented below to let me know about the new date!). Watch as the experts demonstrate advanced features available in Family Tree Maker 2010. Read more and register on Ancestry.com’s website.
  

Friday, March 19, 2010 11:27:44 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

• Our Georgia Roots blogger Luckie Daniels (one of the Family Tree 40) spent part of Thursday tweeting during a close encounter with "Faces of America" host Henry Louis Gates. Read how Luckie asked Gates about highlighting the genealogy of “ordinary people,” who, she said, represent America’s greatest strength—and stay tuned for the follow-up. 

• The National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC, is holding its sixth annual Genealogy Fair April 14 and 15th. Look for free classes and workshop, as well as a "Help! I’m Stuck!” table staffed with genealogy experts. Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, author of the “Who Do You Think You Are?” book, will present a talk April 14 at 7 p.m. Also appearing is Andrew Carroll, editor of the books War Letters and Behind the Lines.

• The state of Georgia announced a partnership with Ancestry.com to offer grants for local governments and historical repositories. Eight organizations will receive up to $10,000 in scanning services. Ancestry.com will digitize and index records and make them available to subscribers. Repositories will receive digital copies of the records and index; they can make the index public immediately and the index after three years.
  
  
• In other Ancestry.com news, the site's version of the Social Security Death Index will now be updated every week.
  

Friday, March 05, 2010 2:41:15 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

• Ancestry.com is holding an Ultimate Family History Journey Sweepstakes to help launch “Who Do You Think You Are?” The grand prize is $20,000 in travel money (!), expert help with your genealogy research, and Ancestry.com subscriptions. Twenty first prize winenrs get a World Deluxe Subscription. Enter at Ancestry.com (scroll to the bottom of the home page and click on the sweepstakes promo) before April 30, 2010, at 11:59 pm ET.

• British subscription and pay-per-view site Findmypast has launched a London Collection with baptism, marriage and burial records dating as far back as 1538. It also has London and West Kent Probate Indexes from 1750 to 1858, and names of participants in the Matchworkers' Strike of 1888. (Many of these records are also in Ancestry.com’s London Parish Records collection, launched last year.)
  

• Stop by Roots Television to watch a neat video from the Jewish Genealogical Society of Colorado, showing stories from those who’ve researched their Jewish family trees.

Friday, February 26, 2010 3:10:04 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [2]

• Neat website alert: The Ministry of Food goes with an Imperial War Museum London exhibit about the British public’s adaption to food shortages during World War II. You can see photos from the exhibit, check out Ministry of Food publications on gardening and cooking, and watch video clips.

And here’s a blog by a woman who’s living for a month on a 1940s British ration diet. 

• And another one: Go to What Happened in My Birth Year for a fun way to see top movies, books and events from the year you were born. Thanks to ResearchBuzz for the heads-up on this site.
  

• Ancestry.com has improved Collection Filters in the New Search. When you’re in the Advanced Search, a pull-down menu lets you give priority to matches associated with various countries or ethnic backgrounds. See how it works on the Ancestry.com blog.

• FamilySearch added records from five new states to the 1910 and 1920 US censuses on the free Record Search Pilot Site. FamilySearch Indexing has started new projects to index records from Germany, Spain, Jamaica, Norway, Alaska, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana and Iowa. Interested in volunteering to be an indexer? Click here.
  

Friday, February 12, 2010 12:07:06 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Watch previews of the show

• Read about and see photos of the celebrities who find out about their family trees, including Lisa Kudrow, Sarah Jessica Parker, Emmitt Smith and others.
  
  
• View historical photos of immigrants on Ellis Island.
  

• "Start your family tree" by typing in your first and last name. (This opens a new window to start a family tree on Ancestry.com, a partner in creating the show.)

• Click Exclusives and read articles about genealogy, start a 14-day trial of Ancestry.com's subscription records databases, or type in your surname to learn family facts (such as the distribution of your surname in various censuses—this also takes you to Ancestry.com)

• Visit the WDYTYA section in NBC's community forum

Wednesday, February 03, 2010 4:17:02 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Footnote hinted on its Facebook page about a new Civil Rights-era records collection to launch in February in partnership with Gannett. Get a glimpse here.

• The free FamilySearch Record Search pilot site has added 25 million new records for Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, England, Germany, Guatemala, South Africa, Switzerland and the United States. They include 1920 US census indexes for Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Wisconsin, South Dakota and Maine; 1935 and 1945 Florida state censuses; Indiana marriages and more.

• Subscription site GenealogyBank is adding 280 new African-American newspapers. The first 50 were released this month; see the titles, where they were published and the years of coverage on the GenealogyBank blog.

• The Victoria County (Texas) Genealogical Society’s website won the 2009 Website of the Year award from the Texas GenWeb Project. The Victoria County site offers local records, historical information, links to resources and more.

• Ancestry.com released the free Tree to Go iPhone app that lets you view your family tree, edit information, add relatives and upload photos on your iPhone or iPod Touch. You’ll first need a tree on Ancestry.com to use the app. Read more on the Ancestry.com blog.

• Ancestry.com also announced it’s getting rid of its Member Connections feature (note this is different from Member Connect, which was launched last year). It would let you let you enter an ancestor’s name and get a list of Ancestry.com members also researching that person, but now you can do pretty much the same thing by searching Public Member Trees.
  

• The National Archives in Washington, DC, is holding a public meeting next Friday, Jan. 29, at 10:45 am to discuss how the archives meets the needs of the research community. Get details on the NGS UpFront blog.
  

Friday, January 22, 2010 9:45:08 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Registration is open for the Southern California Genealogical Society’s annual (and popular) conference, the Jamboree, happening June 11-13. Check out the details and find out how to register on the Jamboree blog.

• The Library and Archives Canada announced its website will be unavailable tomorrow, Jan. 16, from 6 a.m. to 12 p.m. See the original announcement here.

• Ancestry magazine, published for 25 years by Ancestry.com, will be discontinued after the March/April 2010 issue. For more information, see the staff's message on the magazine’s website.

• If you have kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, students, etc., you’ll find ideas for getting them interested in genealogy in a new video from researcher Elyse Doerflinger, who blogs at Elyse's Genealogy Blog.

• In case you missed it, NBC has announced that the US version of "Who Do You Think You Are?" will air Friday, March 5, at 8 p.m.

Friday, January 15, 2010 3:36:48 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• US vital records, digitized in partnership with state archives. They include vital records from Vermont (1908 to 2008) and Delaware (1800 to 1933); divorces from Connecticut; and the Hayes Library Ohio Death Index.
  

Gibbs said that respondents to a lengthy Ancestry.com customer survey chose birth, marriage and death records as the resource they’d most like to see, and 1861 to 1914 as the time period most important to their search.

• Seven state censuses were released last year; look for more this year.

• US county land ownership maps were originally slated for release in 2009, but Gibbs’ team decided to key the records in a more useful but time-intensive way, delaying the launch until 2010.

• Enhanced 1920 US census records and index, similar to the improvements announced in December to earlier census collections.
  

• A 1950 "census substitute" consisting of city directories—helpful to reverse genealogists seeking living relatives, and to beginning researchers.

• 1880 Defective, Dependent and Delinquent ("DDD") schedules. These supplemental census schedules provide details on individuals with disabilities or who were institutionalized. Surviving records are currently scattered among libraries and state archives. (Can't wait until they go online? Download our cheat sheet to DDD schedules and their locations.)
  

• Index improvements to the 1790-to-1840 head-of-household censuses will key the tickmarks indicating household members’ sex, age ranges and status as slave or free, so you’ll be able to search on these parameters.

• The site will add 700 million more names from voter lists to the US Public Records Index database.

Thursday, January 14, 2010 9:32:38 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• A NARA monitor—subsidized by Ancestry.com—must accompany the documents at all times. When employees go on break or leave for the day, the records are locked in a secure room.

• The transport vehicle must have a full gas tank and a specially trained driver who follows approved routes (avoiding highways and other roads that permit vehicles carrying hazardous materials) for the 10-mile trip from NARA to the scanning facility.  

• The documents must be inside when transitioned between the vehicle and the facility.

• The scanning and secure storage rooms can’t be in a basement or on the top floors of a building.

• The facility must have approved surfaces. Some paints, rubbers, carpets and other materials can “off-gass,” or emit vapors that harm documents.  

• The scanning facility must duplicate the conditions of a NARA reading room. Ink pens are banned, for example, and the temperature and humidity are carefully controlled.

• NARA’s security director reviewed the scanning facility and required some changes, such as hardening the entry points.
  

Tuesday, January 12, 2010 9:04:02 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

• About.com: Genealogy, Kimberly Powell

• The Ancestry Insider (see a picture of the whole group on this anonymously authored blog)

• Dear Myrtle

• Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter, Dick Eastman

• GeneaBloggers, Thomas MacEntee

• GeneaBlogie, Craig Manson

• GenealogyBlog, Leland Meitzler

• Genealogy Gems, Lisa Louise Cooke (who also produces the Genealogy Gems Podcast and our Family Tree Magazine Podcast)

Monday, January 11, 2010 10:34:11 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

Welcome to our first news roundup of 2010!

• The 2010 National Genealogical Society (NGS) conference April 28 to May 1 in Salt Lake City, will highlight genealogy technology with a GENTECH Hall sponsored by FamilySearch. (GENTECH is a technology-focused genealogical society that merged with NGS in 2005.) There, nearly 100 technology-oriented exhibitors will feature software, gadgets, social collaboration sites, 60 computers for attendees’ use, and more. A GENTECH lecture track will cover cloud computing, blogs, data storage, social networking, photo editing and other tech topics. Learn more on the conference website.
  

• Genealogy Gems podcaster Lisa Louise Cooke has released the first-ever genealogy podcast app for iPhone and iTouch. The Genealogy Gems Podcast app provides users with streaming genealogy audio and video, and exclusive bonus content including Cooke’s 20 page e-book 5 Fabulous Google Research Strategies for the Family Historian. You can get the app at the iTunes app store. 
  

• Ancestry.com and the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) will sponsor a Family History Day event Saturday, Feb. 20, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Westin Copley Place in Boston. The day will include six classes, a Q&A with Ancestry.com experts, one-on-one consultations with NEHGS genealogists, and the chance to have your photos and documents scanned on professional scanners. Attendance costs $30; click here to register.
  
  
• The 55,000-member Civil War Preservation Trust announced it helped permanently protect 2,777 acres at 20 Civil War battlefields in five states during 2009. The trust's lifetime total comes to more than 29,000 acres of protected battlefield land at 109 sites in 20 states.

Friday, January 08, 2010 10:44:41 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• A New Mexico State University doctoral student is doing a study on cultural identity as explore through genealogy, and she’s looking for genealogists to participate. See the announcement on GeneaBloggers for details on how to participate.

• British genealogy site FamilyRelatives has added a quarter of a million 1889 Scottish Trade Directory records to its databases. The data are searchable with an annual subscription to the site (about $50).

• Ancestry.com has made some changes to how you browse to records in its collections, including removing an ad to make more room, moving the “Browse” box to the top of the home page for each collection, and including the entire collection description rather than a link to see the rest (this one isn’t yet implemented for every collection). See more on the Ancestry.com blog.

• "Who Do You Think You Are?" (US) Watch: NBC still hasn’t scheduled this celebrity genealogy show produced by Lisa Kudrow, according to Hollywood news site The Wrap.

Thursday, December 17, 2009 5:38:45 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1]

• Go to YouTube for a 3.33-minute video slideshow with photos from the inaugural Black Genealogy Summit, Oct. 29 to 31 at the Allen County Public Library in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. About 500 researchers attended the conference to learn about tracing African-American ancestors.

• Ancestry.com has a 5-minute video of some of the company’s leaders and other employees describing what happens behind the scenes to get records from archives to your computer. It’s a commercial, but interesting all the same.
  

Friday, December 04, 2009 3:18:20 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• It really ramps up competition in online genealogy. Right now, Ancestry.com is the only site that offers the entire US census digitized and indexed. I wonder if/how this will affect Ancestry.com’s IPO process—the census claim is probably a major selling point to potential investors.

• Like Footnote's other historical records, its US census collection will be interactive. Members can add comments and insights to a census record, upload and attach photos or documents, create a Footnote Page and identify relatives found in the census by clicking an I’m Related button.
  

Ancestry.com’s new Member Connect features offer interactivity, but not quite to the same extent as Footnote.

Thursday, October 29, 2009 7:27:57 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [0]

• Our online Hispanic Heritage Toolkit has resources and tips for learning about Mexican, Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Central and South American ancestors.
  

See our advice for research in the Caribbean, too.

• Visit the free FamilySearch Record Search Pilot to look for ancestors in the 1930 Mexican census; Mexican baptisms, marriages and burials; and church records from several Mexican states. (Scroll down on this page to see the list).

The site also has a growing collection of church, civil registration and census records from the Caribbean and Central and South America.

• Ancestry.com and the free Ancestry Library Edition (see if it’s available at your library) have border-crossing records from Mexico covering 1903 to 1957. These records are on microfilm at the National Archives.
  
  
• Those with Mexican ancestry can use our Mexican Research Guide, available as a $4 download in our online store.
  

• The Smithsonian lists some events and educator resources, and takes you on a virtual Hispanic heritage cultural tour.

• PBS is airing "Latin Music USA," a documentary series, Mondays, Oct. 12 and 19, from 9 to 11 p.m. ET.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009 9:50:25 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [3]

• The National Genealogical Society (NGS) has launched a blog called UpFront With NGS, which will complement the society’s monthly e-mail newsletter of the same name. News will be posted regularly on the blog, so you don’t have to wait for the e-mail, and you can leave comments on the blog posts.
  

• Ancestry.com is hosting a free webinar to demo its recently released Family Tree Maker 2010 genealogy software. The webinar is Sept. 30 at 8pm EDT. Learn more about the webinar and link to the registration on Ancestry.com’s blog.
  
  
• The McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College has a Web site companion to its special exhibit of the Becker Collection: Drawings of the Civil War Era. The drawings by Joseph Becker and others from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly depict the Civil War, construction of railroads, Chinese in the West, Indian wars, the Chicago fire and more. You can browse drawings by date, place, subject, artist or reference number.
  
  
• Irish-ancestored people, take note: As posted by Dick Eastman, all counties have been added to the National Archives of Ireland's 1911 census Web site. Later this year, you’ll start seeing 1901 census records. The 1901 and 1911 censuses are the only surviving full Irish censuses open for research. Read what’s special about Irish censuses on Dick’s blog.
  
  
• Last, I wanted to point out this fun post by Randy Seaver (a re-post of his earlier post, which I missed the first time around) with links to lists of funny/strange place names.
  

Friday, September 11, 2009 11:16:06 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Subscription family tree site One Great Family exhibited this year as part of a new marketing effort to reach the genealogy community.

One Great Family automatically merges trees when it finds the identical person on both, which sounds a bit scary—but where the trees differ, the site maintains the differences and each member sees the version of the tree he believes is correct. President Rob Armstrong says no one can change your view of your tree, but everyone can see your version and accept your view if they choose. A subscription costs $59.95 annually; a free one-week trial offer is available.

• A new company called Geneartogy uses your ancestors’ names and photos to create frameable, decorative trees on canvas (you also can get the designs on smaller plaques). Prices range from a $98 extra-small plaque to a $408 extra-large canvas, with an additional cost for framing.

• Next year’s FGS conference is slated for August 18-21 in Knoxville, Tenn., home of the East Tennessee Historical Society’s excellent museum and research library (and close to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park). Many classes will cover the historic and cultural roots of Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as the in- and out-migrations of those states.

(The 2010 National Genealogical Society conference, by the way, is in Salt Lake City, so you could double up on a trip to the Family History Library.)

• If you’re new to genealogy conferences, you might be curious about the long panel of ribbons dangling from some attendees’ name badges, like so:

(This is podcast host Dear Myrtle’s badge.) Ribbons designate society memberships, honors and more. All registrants got an “Ancestry.com member” ribbon (whether or not they actually were members) and first-time attendees got “First FGS Conference.” FGS board members, speakers and  genealogical societies delegates received ribbons. I got “Podcast Fan” and “Keeping up With Blogs” at a social networking forum. Some highly involved folks had to take special measures to secure their ribbons:

Wednesday, September 09, 2009 11:31:00 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

It turned out the meeting was more review than news, the company's lawyers having nixed any “forward thinking statements” in anticipation of its IPO.

But I guess a review couldn’t hurt once in awhile, especially with, as content manager Gary Gibb conceded, just-released databases quickly overshadowing ones released just before them, significant additionsbeing termed mere “updates” on the list of recently added content, and some collections (such as audio recordings of oral histories) drowning in the sea of databases.

Key improvements for this year have been:

• Member connect
  

• An enhanced image viewer, which lets you view the record image and the index on the same page. This is available in preview mode for some censuses, including the 1880 US census. It also lets members build a better index by adding alternate information for most fields. The additions are viewable immediately to other people, and they’re searchable within about three weeks.

• Ancestry member trees have a new person and tree viewer that are easier to navigate

• The lifespan search filter, which has eliminated some irrelevant results. A lot still needs to be improved, says VP of product Eric Shoup. He says Ancestry.com won’t “kill” the old search, but wants to create a search experience that combines what works about both the old and new searches. Potential improvements include more control over searches on a place and name, improving the search for an individual collection, making it easier to browse records and changing the search algorithm to deliver relevant results.

• Family Tree Maker 2010 was launched in August.  Among other improvements, it lets you download trees into the program from Ancestry Member trees.

Friday, September 04, 2009 9:20:01 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

We'll keep keeping you updated with conference news.

Wednesday, September 02, 2009 10:27:06 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

• Hundreds of genealogists—your truly included—are packing their bags for the Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference in Little Rock, Ark., Sept. 2 to 5. I’ll write more about the conference in a separate post next week, but in the mean time, you can check out the conference Web site and blog.

• The National Archives’ marriage records (1815 to 1866) from the Virginia Field Office of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau) have been digitized and are now available free at the FamilySearch record search pilot site.

• Subscription genealogy Web site Ancestry.com and its related international sites will be down for scheduled maintenance for about three hours starting Tuesday, Sept. 1 at 1 a.m. Mountain Time. Portions of RootsWeb, Genealogy.com, MyFamily.com and FamilyTreeMaker.com—which live on Ancestry.com servers—also will be unavailable. 
  

• Mark your calendars for National Museum Day Sept. 26, when hundreds of museums across the country will offer free general admission to you and a guest when you present a Museum Day admission card, downloadable from this site.

• A Deerfield, Ill., documentarian has created a show called “The Legend Seekers,” which traces family legends of regular people. You can submit your family story at LegendSeekers.com, see others' stories and get research tips. Chicago-area residents can watch an episode on WTTW Channel 11 Aug. 30 at 12:30 p.m. and 3:30 a.m. Aug. 31. (It’ll also run on WTTW Prime—Comcast Channel 243—at 9:30 p.m. Aug. 31, and 4:30 and 9:30 a.m. Sept. 1.)

Friday, August 28, 2009 11:20:36 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• better tools to create family books from information and photos in your tree
  
  
• the ability to create and export slide shows from photos in your tree
  
  
• scanner support that lets you add photos to your tree right from your scanner and organize them into categories at the same time
  
  
• the ability to track relatives’ migration paths by mapping locations of events such as births, marriages and deaths with Microsoft Bing Maps
  
  
• an improved relationship calculator that lets you view relationships between any two people in your tree
  
  
• a new timeline report and updates to the family group sheet and genealogy reports
  
  
• standard source templates that make it easier to cite a variety of types of sources
  
  
• extended-family birthday and anniversary calendars

Wednesday, August 19, 2009 11:57:44 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [9]

• Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum Records (1878 to 1934): admission applications and discharge ledgers
  
  
• Selected Naturalization Records, New York City (1816 to 1845): declarations of intention for New York County
  
  
• New York Hebrew Orphan Asylum Records (1860 to 1934): admission applications and discharge ledgers
  
  
• Industrial Removal Office Records (1899 to 1922): records of Jews who were assisted in relocating from various countries for safety
  
  
• Selected Insolvent Debtor’s Cases (1787 to 1861): about 2,000 cases
  
  
• Selected Mayor’s Court Cases, New York (1674 to 1860): 6,000 briefs that include summons, complaints, affidavits and jury lists

Monday, August 03, 2009 9:39:49 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• First, a reminder that if you plan to subscribe to Footnote or renew your subscription, stop procrastinating. The $59.95 annual subscription sale ends at midnight tonight (July 31). Also tomorrow, the membership rate goes from $69.95 to $79.95 per year.

• Another reminder for those who’ve been meaning to search the Caribbean slave records on Ancestry.com—the free period ends tonight. More on this collection here.
  

• Speaking of Ancestry.com, the new Member Connect features—which let you comment on and correct records, as well as get in touch with other members—went live this week. Click here for more on Member Connect.

• The FGS 09 conference is just a month away, Sept. 2-5 in Little Rock, Ark. Get news updates and registration information from the conference blog, and when you’re there, stop by to see us at the Family Tree Magazine booth (#407).
  

• This from Dick Eastman’s blog: The British national archives and UK-based family history site Findmypast.com are giving seven repositories in England and Wales free online access to the recently completed 1911 census records. See Dick's post for the list of archives.

Friday, July 31, 2009 2:19:19 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• New records this week on the free FamilySearch Record Search Pilot  include an index to Cheshire, England, Non-conformist records (1671 to 1900), and index to the 1895 Minnesota state census, and images for the 1905 New York state census (the index is still in progress).

New indexing projects are underway for Italy, New Zealand, Perú and the United States; volunteers who can help with foreign language projects are needed. Go to the FamilySearch Indexing site for more information.

• Library and Archives Canada’s online Canadian Genealogy Center—one of our 101 Best Web Sites for 2009—released an index of 206,731 Canadians naturalized from 1915 to 1932. You can use the information in the database to request the original naturalization records.

• The International Association of Jewish Genealogists conference is coming right up Aug. 2-7 in Philadelphia. Besides genealogy classes and an exhibit hall, you can use a Resource Room stocked with research materials and computers. Extracurriculars include walking tours, bus tours and cemetery research trips. Visit the conference Web site for registration information.

• A Twitter retweet from @mdiane_rogers led us to a free database from professional genealogy firm Price & Associates of indentured immigrants who arrived between 1607 and 1820. You can search by first and last name, date and place of of birth, and other parameters. Sources of the information are listed on the site.
  

• Ancestry.com has upgraded its “hinting engine” for FamilyTreeMaker. Now a faster, higher-capacity engine will automatically search Ancestry.com and display a leaf next to a name in FamilyTreeMaker's pedigree and detail views if there's a potential match. The new engine also searches Ancestry Member Trees instead of One World Tree data.
  

Friday, July 24, 2009 2:25:54 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

• The Generations Network, parent company of Ancestry.com, has a poignant new ad campaign you’ll probably catch on some media or other (if you’re worried you’ll miss it, see it on Ancestry.com’s YouTube channel). 

• Ancestry.com also has developed an Ancient Ancestry Finder that guesses your haplogroup (ancestral origins) based on a few questions. It’s fun, and the haplogroups have cute names such as "Boatbuilders" and "Inventors," but keep in mind it's not necessarily accurate. At the end, you get a pitch to buy a $79 DNA test to determine if the Finder is correct.

• If you’ve been thinking of trying the databases at NewEnglandAncestors.org, now might be the time. The New England Historic Genealogical Society is offering $15 off new memberships during July.

• This week, FamilySearch enhanced its free Record Search Pilot with 12 new collections, which have records from Argentina, Australia, Mexico, Netherlands, and Spain. New United States collections were added for Delaware, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Utah.

International indexing projects now underway involve records from the Czech Republic; Baden, Germany; and South Africa—click here if you’re interested in volunteering.

• Following on the heels of Footnote’s partnership with newspaper publisher Gannett, ProQuest announced it’s adding Gannett papers to its Newsstand data service (offered through libraries). ProQuest will offer the papers back to 1977; Footnote is digitizing older editions.

• The Houston Metropolitan Research Center (HMRC) at the Houston Public Library's downtown Julia Ideson Building is changing its research hours during a renovation. Now through Aug. 31, HMRC is open Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sept. 1 to Oct. 31, it'll be open by appointment—call (832) 393-1313 to make one.

Thursday, July 02, 2009 11:18:55 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [2]

• When you search and view a record, you'll see member names of Ancestry.com users who’ve edited the record (for example, by entering an alternate transcription of the name), or saved the record to a tree or shoebox.
  

You’ll also get suggestions for related message boards (such as the Roberts surname board for your search on Jeremiah Roberts) and people who’ve listed related research interests in their profiles (for example, others looking for Robertses in Muncie, Ind.). Then you can visit that person’s tree or contact him through the site.

• A tab in your Ancestry.com member tree will show you other members’ ancestors who may match people in your tree. If the match looks promising, a Connect button links the trees and shows you more details—including buttons highlighting new or conflicting information. You can remove the connection altogether, or click the buttons to decide what to do with each fact: keep the new information out of your tree, it as an alternate fact, or use it to replace your information.
  

You also can contact the member with the matching tree through Ancestry.com to thank him or ask about any errors. This way, the “good data” in Ancestry.com trees will become more prominent than erroneous data, Graham says.

• As you link to others’ trees, you build a network of researchers—called “connections”—who share your genealogical interests. More tabs show you your connections’ activity related to people common to both trees, including updated information and records and new records added.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 1:21:07 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [5]

• The National Archives of Ireland free 1911 census site added records for Cork, Donegal, Galway, King's County and Wexford to those already online (from Antrim, Down, Dublin and Kerry).

Get more details on the site in this Genealogy Insider blog post.

• Millions of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services' alien case files (also called A-files) dating from 1944 and later were signed over to the National Archives (records will be relocated to the National Archives’ San Francisco and Kansas City facilities later this year).

Henceforth, USCIS can forward files 100 years after the birth date of the person whose file it is. The USCIS press office tells me you’ll still be able to order the 1944-to-1951 A-files through the USCIS Genealogy Program (through which you also can order naturalizations and alien registrations).

• Subscription newspaper and records service GenealogyBank added or expanded newspaper collections from 22 states. The new content is listed by state here, or go here to view the complete list of newspapers.
  

• Subscription site Ancestry.com is letting you preview upcoming changes to the family tree pages—to see them, click Family Trees on Ancestry.com's home page, then click the light blue bar at the top that says “Check out the new look.” (You must have a tree on Ancestry.com to see the preview.)
  

The new look will make pages load faster, be easier to navigate and display more information, says Kenny Freestone on the Ancestry.com blog. Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings describes the changes in detail.

Friday, June 05, 2009 1:46:42 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

• New content on subscription site World Vital Records includes pre-1700 New England marriages and names of about 8,500 Union soldiers who were for various reasons omitted from the original Roll of Honor (a listing of Union burials in national cemeteries).

One addition, the Protestation Returns, which record religious loyalty oaths from males in England from 1641 to 1642, is free for 10 days (from May 28).

• Ancestry.com passed 8 billion records in its databases (a record in this case is a name, not a document). The vital records collection is biggest, with 1,100 million records and 38.9 million document images; followed by censuses at 900 million records and 27.7 million images.
  

On deck at Ancestry.com: Improving the census collection (1790 through 1900 censuses should be updated by year’s end), newspapers from 50 new cities and early city directories.

• FamilySearch has added volunteer indexing projects from around the world, including Argentina; British Columbia, Canada; France; and NorthDakota, South Carolina, Ohio and Indiana. For details about the records and years being indexed, see the FamilySearch Indexing Web site.
  

Click here to volunteer to index some records.

Friday, May 29, 2009 1:35:26 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]

• Genealogy Freelancers: This site lets you post your project details and get bids from professionals around the world.

• Genlighten: Here, you also can collect bids for research tasks. The focus here is on lookups, record retrieval and similar services.

• Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness: These volunteers have signed on to do simple research favors for free (except expenses such as mileage and photocopying fees). You’re encouraged to return the favor by helping out someone else.

• Repositories sometimes keep lists of nearby professional researchers (contact the genealogy department). For example, if you want to hire someone to copy your ancestor’s Civil War pension file, see the National Archives’ list of local researchers by topic and location.
  
  
• For long or more-complicated research projects, you can find directories of professional genealogists on the Association for Professional Genealogists Web site, ProGenealogists, and the Board for Certification of Genealogists.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009 10:59:01 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4]

A lot of numbers were tossed out, which the company uses to understand which Ancestry.com databases and features you use most. For example, after member-to-member messaging was moved onto the site (so instead of just sending an e-mail to another user, you send a message that’s stored in the person’s in-box on the site), members sent 25 percent more messages. Responses increased 35 percent.

Some interesting stats involved the new search interface vs. the old one. Use of the two is evenly split, with longer-time members sticking with the old interface and newer members favoring the new interface (I have to wonder if they just haven’t discovered the old search yet). “Old-search searchers” do an average of 37 searches a day, and “new-search searchers” do an average of 21 searches per day.

The guy in charge of developing a newer new search, Tony Macklin, was frank about what’s wrong with the new search (this is from my scribbled notes, so it’s not a direct quote): queries don’t always return consistent results between the two platforms, you get too many irrelevant results, browsing by place is too difficult, and the individual database search templates aren’t as customized (Macklin uses the old search for individual databases). His examples were coupled with user comments.

He said changing the search interface without changing the actual search was a mistake, and the goal is to eventually bring together the best parts of both platforms. 

Content-wise, Ancestry.com has grown to 8 billion names. Family trees recently passed the census as the most-used data set.

Some upcoming additions include the WWII “Old Man’s Draft” for Illinois, newspapers from 30 new cities, Jewish records with two new yet-to-be-announced partners, Navy cruise books, pre-1850 city directories and vital records.

In a large reception Ancestry.com held last night for conference attendees, senior VP Andrew Waite said the company is aiming for a balance of 30 percent upgrading current collections and 70 percent adding new ones—but that this figure has been more like 50/50 during the last few months.

Ruth Daniels from the UK office talked about negotiating digitization agreements in other countries, where records may be widely dispersed at state and local repositories, and laws and cultural attitudes differ around who should have access to records. For example, public access laws make UK records easier to acquire; Italy’s decentralized archives make things more challenging there. The just-released German telephone directories and records from the London Metropolitan Archives, launched in March and still being added, are two successes.

Friday, May 15, 2009 9:28:46 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1]

• Subscription genealogy site Ancestry.com launched a collection of German phone directories dating from 1915 to 1981. The books, which are, of course, in German, list names and addresses of more than 35 million people who lived in Germany’s major cities, as well as many businesses. 
  

• British subscription and pay-per-view site FindMyPast.com added merchant seaman crew indexes with 270,000 names of seafarers between 1860 and 1913. British ships created these lists every six months, including everyone from captains to able seamen, from engine room staff to stewardesses.

• The 1916 census of Canada is now available free at Family History Centers through their on-site Ancestry.com service. (Meaning this census isn’t on the FamilySearch pilot site—you must go to a Family History Center to search it.)
  

• The National Archives granted its first Excellence in Genealogy Awards to Myron McGhee of Decatur, GA, who took first place, and Stephanie D. Smith of Richtor Park, IL, who took second. Read about their entries on the archives’ Web site.
  

• The heritage travel Web site Go With a Purpose launched a new section called Go Connect, where users can upload photos with their reviews of historic destinations. Learn more on the site’s blog.

• A late addition: The New England Historic Genealogical Society is adding digitized back issues of the journal The American Genealogist, to its subscription databases at NewEnglandAncestors.org. Vols. 1 through 8 (published as Families of Ancient New Haven) and Volumes 9–13 (dated from 1933 through 1937), are available now in separate databases. Additional volumes will be added. NEHGS memberships start at $75.

Friday, May 08, 2009 2:02:07 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0]