In early June, we launched a preview of these enhancements to the family tree.   Our goal was to help you become familiar with the changes before they were incorporated on the site, as well as give us your opinion of the new design.  We received over 8,000 responses, the large majority of them very much excited to see the preview features implemented. We are very grateful for the time and care you put in to providing such insightful feedback, and made several changes to the preview as a direct result of your feedback.

Since the new look launched (yesterday morning) we have received nearly 4,000 feedback responses.  We’re taking notes and making plans for additional improvements as people get used to the new look and we learn better how to optimize it.  We encourage you to continue sending us your feedback through the feedback link in your family tree.

To learn more about the improvements we’ve made, you can visit our earlier blog post announcing the preview as well as our welcome page which gives a quick overview.

Ancient Ancestry Finder™ predicts likely ancestry for both your maternal and your paternal lines.  So, if you’ve only taken one of our tests try it out and see what our best guess is for the test you haven’t taken.

 We’ve offered ancient ancestry information as part of our results package for several years.  If you’ve taken a test, you’ve received a haplogroup designation and name (like The Ice Immigrants or The Stonemasons).  Your results include a short, basic story describing the lives of your likely ancestors.  In addition to connections that can help grow your family tree, we give you a bigger picture to let you imagine what your earliest people were doing back when humanity was just getting started.

To give everyone a sampling of these results, with Finder™ we’ve built a simple experience that takes a best guess at describing your ancient ancestors.   You answer 2 or 3 questions with the most basic info about your family (facts almost everyone knows).  And then we provide a few options for likely ancient ancestral groups, along with descriptions of those groups.  The only way to narrow down those options to the most likely result is by taking an Ancestry.com DNA test.

The spirit of Finder™ is a bit different from what you may have experienced on our site.  It’s part of our effort to introduce ancestry and genealogy to a wider audience.  And the more people who become interested in Ancestry.com DNA and genealogy, the larger our database becomes.  And that benefits us all.

Check it out here!

Defining and counting records on Ancestry.com

The concept of ‘counting’ records sounds relatively simple until you get deep into the details. How is a record defined? Is it a mention of a person? A household? A page? If a birth record has the person, parents, doctor and witness, how many records is that? And what of records where we don’t know for certain how many people are referenced, such as newspapers or city directories?

For our ‘fielded’ or indexed collections - structured data such as censuses and passenger lists - a record count is defined as the information about each specific person included. For example, one WWI Draft Registration Card is counted as one record. Similarly, each line on a census page is also counted as one record as typically it to will contain information about a specific individual.

For our ‘unfielded‘ collections such as newspapers and family histories, there is no underlying structure to define a field and so until now pages have been sampled then an average applied to determine an estimated name count. For example, our 42.5 million (countable) newspaper pages were multiplied by 60 names per page to achieve an estimated total name count.

Traditionally, we have counted our total number of records by combining the number of records for each person contained in our fielded collections and the estimated number of names in our unfielded collections.

However, as our company and collections have grown so significantly in recent years, we have decided to apply a new and highly conservative counting methodology that better reflects our differing data structures. Going forward, all unfielded pages will now be counted as one record - no name estimates will be included in our total record counts.

So what does this mean?

Based on this new methodology we have over 4 billion records. Previously, we referred to an estimated 8 billion names listed with in our record collections. This is a change to our counting methodology only - no records have been removed. Ancestry.com members will continue to have access to all the great records they had previously.

With new records launching every week, these numbers are always increasing. More importantly, no matter how we count them, our goal is to continue to bring millions of valuable records to our members like we’ve been doing for more than a decade.

The new television spots feature the following heartwarming stories:

A New Yorker Finds Answers about His Father - Alton Woodman (White Plains, N.Y.) never knew much about his dad, who passed away when Alton was just 14 years old. Turning to Ancestry.com, Alton found his father in a 1920 census record as a 14 year old himself, and discovered that he was attending an orphanage. To help connect the dots, Alton got in touch with a representative from the orphanage and received a package that offered a more complete picture of his father’s childhood.

Above: 1920 Census Record for Alton’s Father.

One Man Discovers His Great Grandfather was a War Hero - Cary Christopher (Pittsburgh and San Diego) always wondered about his German great grandfather, who disappeared after a short-lived marriage to Cary’s great grandmother ended in divorce. After 40 years of futile searching, Cary discovered his great grandfather in a World War I draft registration card on Ancestry.com. It turned out his great grandfather had immigrated to the United States before World War I, became a U.S. citizen and rose to the rank of Captain in the U.S. Merchant Marines, where he was killed by a torpedo fired by a German submarine during World War II.

South Florida Man Connects Father to His Own Mother - Jim Lane’s (Key Biscayne, Fla.) father never knew his mother, who died when he was an infant. Through historical records and member connection services on Ancestry.com, Jim discovered relatives who sent him pictures of his grandmother, and for the first time, Jim’s father was able to see a photograph of his mother.

Above: A picture of Jim’s Grandmother Donna.

Chicago Cook Meets Like-Minded Cousin - When caterer Peggy McDowell (Chicago) began researching the cooking talent in her family tree, she had no idea she would end up going into business with a long-lost cousin. Through searching records on Ancestry.com, she connected with her cousin, who also shares her passion for cooking. Together, they’re opening up a soul food restaurant in Chicago’s Hyde Park.

Here is an example of one of the spots, featuring Peggy:

Washington Woman Confirms Father’s Passing - Cathryn Darling (Olympia, Wash.) had many unanswered questions about her father, who had disappeared when she was eight years old after her parent’s divorce. After searching Ancestry.com’s obituary records, Cathryn learned her father died as a fisherman while at sea in Oregon in 1970, and she recently held a memorial service in his honor.

We hope you enjoy these stories as much as we do! Take a minute and check out the rest of the television spots, or read the press release.

We began the beta portion of the project in June of 2008, since then we have had a wonderful response from many of you including a number of partnerships with genealogical societies.  Your passion for this work is evident through the phenomenal activity we see daily, you’re an amazing group and on behalf of me and the entire World Archives Project staff we want to thank you!

 I also want to take a moment to thank our staff who shares a love and enthusiasm for this project providing many hours of “behind the scenes” work.

 Just as the thrill of watching a baby take its first steps or say their first words this project has been filled with many firsts, all of which have been fun to anticipate and participate in.  I’m excited to see what can be accomplished in our next year!

 Key Data and Milestones

• Developed an industry leading desktop transcription tool.
• Public launch March 2009 with over 12,000 contributors participating in the beta
• Over 19,000 contributors YTD, located in 70 countries & territories.
• Over 28.7 Million records keyed and arbitrated (will result in more than 13 million free record indexes that will be published to the Ancestry sites.
• More than 367 thousand hours logged.
• Three collections, over 438k free records published to the site
• Partnerships with 19 Genealogical Societies

If you would like to participate in the project go to www.ancestry.com/worldarchivesproject

Record Pickup – Hire a researcher in another state or country to visit a specific archive, collect the record you need and send it to you.

Local Photo – Pay a researcher in your ancestor’s hometown to snap a picture of a headstone, historic building or other landmark.

Ask an Expert – Post a question to a range of professionals and get the advice and direction you need.

Record Lookup –Work with a professional to track down hard to find records and retrieve a copy for you.

Custom Research – Recruit a seasoned professional to take on a complex project that may be beyond your experience or time availability.

Starting a project is simple and there are hundreds of experts available to help from the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and the United Kingdom. More are joining everyday offering their unique services. These are terrific, dedicated people with a passion for genealogy and a real desire to help you discover more of your family history. With their help you just may find that brickwall in your research start to crumble.

Check out the beta site at expertconnect.ancestry.com. Please provide your feedback as you use the service. We are excited to offer yet another way to help you discover your story.

Here’s a preview (click the image to see a larger version):

First, we’ve added some tools to help you find what you are looking for on an image:

• a collapsible index panel below the image will show you the transcription for each record on the image. This will help you locate your ancestor on the image as well as show you who else is on the page and what information was transcribed for each record.
• a collapsible source panel so that you can quickly view the source citation and learn more about the data collection
• a collapsible member connect panel so that you can see who has had something to add to this record, and who has been researching it.

While all of these panels will help you understand the image, you can also collapse them with one quick click of the mouse to see the full image.

Second, we’ve enhanced our member editing capabilities.

You’ll be able to update not only given names and surnames, but also birth year and various locations associated with a record. Nobody knows your ancestor as well as you do, and leaving these nuggets of information behind for us to incorporate into our indexes will help others who are looking for your ancestors as well.

You’ll also be able to update information from the image page as well as the record page.

Sometime in mid to late July we will be launching this new enhanced image page on about 70 of our census data collection including most of the US and UK censuses.

I’ll post more previews as we get closer to launch.

Happy Searching!

I’m constantly impressed at how much our members know…so a word of caution…If you already have a basic knowledge of how genetic genealogy testing works and how to use our service, you may want to skip this presentation and wait for future webinars to address advanced concepts. This webinar is perfect for people who are completely new to DNA testing.

Emphasis will be on our Paternal Lineage Test (Y-Chromosome 33), but we’ll also explain how and when to use the other tests we offer. And we’ll give real-life examples of how women can use the Paternal Lineage Test to grow their family trees.

Specifically, you can expect to learn how:

- DNA testing for genealogy works–in easy terms.
- To understand and apply your results to grow your tree.
- Ancestry.com DNA testing can continue to pay off for years.
- Women can benefit from a Paternal Lineage test.
- To use Ancestry.com DNA features: Groups, Transfer to Tree, and Ancient Ancestry.

Darlene Odenwalder, myself, and Elise Allen will speak during our webinar. Darlene is the DNA Project Coordinator and has researched genealogy for over 20 years, teaching classes in her local community. I’m the Director of Product Marketing and oversee the Ancestry.com DNA business, optimizing the delivery of products and services to our members. Elise writes science content for our users and received a master’s degree in the biosciences in 1999.
The last 20 minutes of this one-hour webinar include a Q & A session. We’re taking questions in advance—enter questions when you register or as comments here. We’ll answer your questions on July 8, in the Webinar. Register for the webinar and we’ll see you then!

If you ran into errors on the site because of this, they should be fully resolved now.  If you continue to experience errors we recommend that you close your internet browser and try coming back to the site using a new browser window.  Thank you for your patience as we work to make sure the site is running smoothly for you.

• Friday, June 26th, 12:30pm  - Family Tree Maker demo at the Ancestry.com booth
• Saturday, June 27th, 12:30pm - Family Tree Maker demo at the Ancestry.com booth
• Sunday, June 28th, 11:00am - Getting the Most out of Family Tree Maker class
• Sunday, June 28th, 12:30pm - Famiy Tree Maker demo at the Ancestry.com booth

If you can make it, I’ll look forward to seeing you there!