U.S. Indian Census Schedules, 1885-1940

U.S. Native American Enrollment Cards for the Five Civilized Tribes, 1898-1914

U.S. Native American Applications for Enrollment in Five Civilized Tribes, 1896

Your responses to date on the simple question of your returning the ED descriptions for New York, New York County for the 1900 census that were there before you “improved”the index (since it was search index-related I mistakenly assumed this belonged to Anne) have been:

August 13, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Bob, One of our genealogists is assessing the severity of the issue you’ve noted. More to come on this.
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August 21, 2009 at 9:59 am
#10 – Bob, The ED issue is being looked at.
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August 21, 2009 at 10:45 am
On the issue of missing EDs, below is the the I received from an internal source. If this is not accurate, please be patient with us as we need to better understand your question.

- Are you certain the ED descriptions were there previously for the cities you mention?

- Is it possible that you could be mistakenly confusing the A.com 1900 US Federal Census with either (1) the A.com 1920 US Federal Census, or (2) an unrelated Web site?
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August 25, 2009 at 11:46 am
#62 and #63 – I’ve forwarded your feedback to the expert on the case. We’ll get back to you again on this.
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I originally asked this question on the ancestry comments board at Rootsweb in response to Anne’s boast that “Censuses that have been improved already are 1900 (index and images) and 1880 (images). We are currently working on the 1880 index . . .”

As I wrote on 4/22:
This is a perfect example of ancestry not thinking through an issue. You may have improved the 1900 index, but you have made it absolutely useless to browsers. Prior to your improvements, if one were to browse a large city, e.g. New York or Chicago, there would be a description of the ED within the appropriate county.

Now there is nothing but a series of meaningless ED numbers with no description. Chicago is not as bad as New York. At least for Cook County – Chicago you maintained the Wards so there are only 20 or 30 meaningless ED numbers at a time. For New York, there are over 1,000 meaningless numbers in a virtually endless stream. And since you don’t believe in leading zeros, they are not even in numerical order.

You have the information for each ED boundary since it was there before your “improvement.” Could you please put the data back?
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Anne did not see fit to respond. So, I have another simple question:

Assuming a subscriber has an issue with the index used to search for U.S. content, who is responsible

a) the Sr. Manager, Customer Experience
b) the Product Manager, Search
c) the Product Manager, U.S. Content
d) the Vice President of Content
e) the VP of Product for Ancestry
f) the generic product managers, (Freestone, Graham, et. al.)
g) none of the above

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On your #68, thanks for the further reply. You said:

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“#58 – Mike, I cannot reveal the organizations, states, counties, etc. that we are working with to digitize records. It will need to suffice to say that we are working with many, many organizations.”

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Why can you not reveal the repositories you are working with? Is it because your marketing dept. does not wish you to? Surely there is no need for secrecy on the repository side is there? Since most of those are publicly funded agencies and subject to open records laws most likely, then if I were to inquire of a repository I cannot see them refusing to tell me if they currently had a project with Ancestry. Or are you in fact saying these state repositories do want confidentiality until your marketing dept. hypes the release of a new database?

Also again, if there are repositories who are *totally* uncooperative, then I think not only does Ancestry not lose anything by naming them as such, but also that it helps by customers then knowing where to apply political pressure to induce future cooperation.

MikeF