Articles by Anne Mitchell

Ancestry Search: Improvements to Basic Search

Why have we changed the search form?
Over the past year, we have been working with a wide range of ancestry.com members, from some of our most experienced members to relative newcomers. We’ve had a lot of help (including over 10,000 responses to the preview we published in April: Preview of Changes to Ancestry.com Search).
Based on… Read more

Ancestry Search: Searching using Birth, Death and other Life Events

Over the course of this year, we have been making incremental changes to our new search forms in response to your comments and suggestions. We’ve added name and place filters and changed the way you could do searches that included family members.
You’ll find we’ve modifed the search forms just a bit to make entering… Read more

Issues with US 1850, 1860 Census and UK 1871 census.

We are aware of the issues with the US 1850 and 1860 census as well as the UK 1871 census producing strange results in search and having bad links in online trees.
We are working on resolving it as quickly as possible.
Thank you for your patience.
Update: The issue has been resolved, links and search on these… Read more

Ancestry.com Search: New way to add Family Members to your search

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be making a number of changes to the new search forms. We hope to make searches more flexible, and in response to your feedback we have improved some searches that were hard to do. You can get a sneak preview of some of these at the search update guided… Read more

Ancestry search: Intermittent problems with place type-ahead

We are currently experience intermittent delays in the place type-ahead and are working on the issue.
We appreciate your patience.

Ancestry Search: Place Filters on New Advanced Search

This year one of the things we are focusing on is adding new ways for you to control what’s returned in your search results. Over the past few months, we have already launched improvements to wildcards, Collection Filters, and Record Type Filters
Earlier Tony Macklin announced that we will be launching a tour to give you… Read more

Ancestry Search: Name and Place Filters coming to New Advanced Search this week!

This year one of the things we are focusing on is adding new ways for you to control what’s returned in your search results. Over the past few months, we have already launched improvements to wildcards, Collection Filters, and Record Type Filters
Earlier today Tony Macklin announced that we will be launching a tour to give you… Read more

Search is experiencing intermittent issues.

Our search has been experiencing intermittent technical issues this morning. We are working on the problem and apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.
Update: We are also experiencing some intermittent technical issues with Ancestry Family Trees and are actively working to resolve them.  We hope to have everything resolved shortly.  Thank you again for your… Read more

New filtering options coming to new search

You’ve been asking for better ways to control your results. Over the next couple of months, we will be launching two new sets of filters in new search. One will be a name filter, with specific options for first and last names, and the other will be a place filter.
Here’s a quick preview:

Name… Read more

Ancestry Search: Improved Collection Filters

As we mentioned last month, we will be launching a series of filters in new search with the aim of giving the experienced searcher a lot more control over his searches and therefore making it much easier to understand search results.
Early on Thursday Feb 11, we will be launching our improved Collection Filters, which… Read more