In commemoration of Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday, Ancestry.com has added five new databases to its Civil War Collection. One of the databases includes the Abraham Lincoln Papers from the Library of Congress containing more than 20,000 documents such as drafts of speeches, incoming and outgoing correspondence with the president, and printed material. The Abraham Lincoln [...]

Ancestry.com is excited to be a major sponsor of the 5th Annual St. George, Utah, Family History Expo!

When: February 27-28th, 2009, 8AM – 6PM
Where: The Dixie Center, located at 1835 Convention Center Drive, St. George, Utah 84790

The expo features two full days of classes taught by some of the nation’s top family history instructors. The [...]

We’ve added three new features to the MyCanvas publishing service that I think you’ll love. Many of you have asked for a way to keep track of which photos you’ve already used in a family history book or photo book. We agree that this is a pretty important feature ― especially if you’re working on [...]

One of the comments I hear most is concerned with book-building: Where did it go? And will it ever come back? Thankfully, the people at Family Tree Maker have been listening. With this 2009 software update, you can once again create your own family history book from the convenience of your computer desktop. 
Getting started is [...]

At the end of January Ancestry.com made 134 million General Records Office (GRO) UK birth records for England and Wales dating from 1837 to 2005 available online for the first time, fully searchable by name, registration date and district. This was done as an update to the existing England & Wales Birth Index collection.  
Many of [...]

I wanted to give everyone a quick update on a few of the changes that have been made to improve site performance over the past few weeks.  We recognize we are by no means done.  These represent our first set of improvements:
1. Compression:  Across the site we’ve compressed the code that has to be downloaded [...]

Two U.S. collections grew today:
Kansas State Census Collection, 1855-1925
Added the 1925 census, containing 1.8 million names.  The full collection now contains 8.2 Million Names.

State censuses were often taken in years between the federal censuses. In some places, local censuses were designed to collect specific data, such as the financial strengths and needs of communities; tallies [...]

Just to introduce myself, I’m Jen Curry, a product manager here at Ancestry. Last month I started working full-time on the maps feature, which is why this post is coming from me instead of Kenny. As most of you know, last November we launched a new feature to Ancestry Member Trees which allows you to see the life [...]

I posted this week about last Saturday’s planned maintenance and the issues that ensued.  Our data center provider has corrected the problem they experienced last week and will proceed with their planned maintenance this weekend.
Maintenance will begin on Friday, 6 February 2009 at midnight (MST) and finish on Saturday, 7 February 2009 at 8:00 [...]

The 2009 Software Update contains some exciting new (and updated) features! Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing my thoughts and experiences that I hope will help you take advantage of all the great new enhancements. Today we’ll look at source templates.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit this: I don’t always practice what I [...]