Planned Maintenance For Family Trees Service Tonight

We plan to upgrade our trees service tonight, adding some fancy new hardware and software.  We expect that the service will be unavailable for about 2 hours starting around 1:00 AM mountain time.
This tree service downtime will affect Member Trees, OneWorldTree, some portions of My Canvas, the sections of the Home Page that are related to Member… Read more

Attaching someone else’s DNA to your online family tree

Many of you, in fact almost four thousand of you, have already attached DNA to your online family tree.  As you know, this translates into a much larger potential for people finding and connecting to your family tree.  As more people add their results, the Ancestry.com DNA database becomes a powerful asset toward making connections… Read more

Working with text boxes in MyCanvas

In keeping with our “freedom of expression” philosophy, the MyCanvas publishing service provides many different tools for editing and manipulating text in a book, poster or calendar. We give you so many options that you may not be aware of some of them, even if you’re an experienced MyCanvas user.
In MyCanvas you can:

Position a new… Read more

London Workhouse Records and More to Come

On March 26 Ancestry announced the first release of data to the definitive collection of records detailing the rich history of London and its inhabitants over 400 years. This historic collection is being completed in partnership with London Metropolitan Archives and Guildhall Library Manuscripts following a competitive tender by the City of London to digitise and exclusively host… Read more

Ancestry.com Is Coming to Raleigh, North Carolina!

Ancestry.com is proud to sponsor the 2009 National Genealogical Society Family History Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. Don’t miss these four days of family history, classes, exhibit halls and much, much more.
 2009 National Genealogical Society Family History Conference
May 13–16, 2009
Raleigh Convention Center, Raleigh, North Carolina
 
Exhibit Hall – Free to the Public
Stop by the Ancestry.com booth in… Read more

Some improvements to the online Messages feature

I had posted previously about our new online Messages feature and I just wanted to give an update about some improvements we’ve made to it, largely based on your feedback.
The improvement I am most excited about is the addition of “Ancestor Links” in messages.  Some of the member trees on Ancestry.com are private and to… Read more

Family Tree Maker: The Extended Family Chart

As you probably know by now, the 2009 Software Update includes a new chart: the Extended Family. This tree displays every individual in your file or just the ancestors and descendants of a specific individual. Each generation appears on its own horizontal row: grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, and so forth.

Huge new content addition for more recent years

We are launching huge new content additions over the next few weeks.  We are excited because it helps provide records from 1935 to today.  We have great census and vital records from 1930 and before but more recent records are difficult to acquire.  These new records are being provided in 4 major releases.
First, we launched a 1940 census substitute. This is… Read more

Ancestry.com DNA haplogroup designations

We’ve received a few comments on our postings with respect to our haplogroup designations, so I thought it would be a good idea to address this subject in greater detail.   What is a haplogroup?  How are haplogroups determined?  Do they ever change; and if so, why?   
What is a haplogroup?
As our ancient ancestors migrated from Africa tens… Read more

Update about temporary site problems this morning

As an update to our previous post, we wanted to let everyone know that we have resolved many of the issues we were experiencing on the site this morning.  In general the homepage should load properly for you.
The two temporary exceptions are the Quick Links and To-do sections.  For now, these two sections will not… Read more