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.

For those of us that have some Canadian roots this is a great day. I have already found many records about my ancestors in these collections.  The complete collection is useful for helping to track an ancestor’s life and understanding the family. We have had the complete national census collections for the US and the UK for years now but this is the first time we have it for Canada. We were able to partner with the Library and Archives in Canada and with FamilySearch to make this happen in a very aggressive timeframe from the public release of these records by the Canadian government.

We hope you find a lot of success in this collection and we would love to hear from you about it.

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This newsletter is a great resource that not everyone has. I would love to hear your thoughts about the Ancestry Monthly Update.

We just released today the German Phone Directories 1915-1981. This is a unique colleciotn of books that contains over 35 million people that lived in the major cities in Germany in the 20th century. This is the first time these records have been available online.

As phone books provide an annual account of an individual’s location, they are a hugely valuable resource for tracing people’s movements around Germany before or after the two World Wars and the Great Depression, during the tyranny of the Third Reich and following Germany’s division by the Berlin Wall.

In addition to everyday Germans, the phone books contain names of some of the country’s most famous – and infamous – citizens, including:

                Albert Einstein – The Nobel Prize winning physicist is listed in the 1930 Berlin directory as Prof. Dr. Univ. His phone number was 2807 (original image available)

                Marlene Dietrich – The legendary actress who starred in Shanghai Express is listed in the 1930 Berlin directory living at 54 Kaiserallee. Her telephone number was H1 Pfalzburg 2142 (original image available)

                Eva Braun – Mistress and later wife of Adolf Hitler, Ms. Braun is listed in the 1937 Munich directory living at Wasserburger Strasse. Her telephone number was 480844 (original image available)

Rudolf Hess – Hitler’s private secretary and later Deputy Fuhrer is listed in the 1938 Hamburg directory, which describes his title as ‘SS-Untersturmfuhrer’ (original image available)

Dr Karl Braun – The physicist, inventor and Nobel Prize winner travelled to the US in 1914 but was forbidden to return when America entered the First World War. He is listed in the 1915 Berlin director, with no further entries after that year. Braun died in Brooklyn, New York in 1918 (original image available)

                Otto Lagerfeld – The father of the famous fashion designer Karl appears in the 1933 Hamburg directory living in the wealthy Elbchaussee. His telephone number was 462349.  It is believed that Karl Lagerfeld still owns an exclusive villa on that street (original image available)

                Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert von Preußen – Germany’s last Kaiser is listed in the 1915 Berlin directory residing in the Royal Castle Berlin. His phone number was 482 (original image available)

We hope you enjoy these German records.

First, we launched a 1940 census substitute. This is a project that we have been working on for years.  Since we can’t get the real 1940 census until 2012 we have pulled together a huge collection of city directories from about 1935 to 1945.  This collection has over 100 million names and covers most of the US. 

Second, we will launch in the next week (or two) the first ever collection of U.S. Public Records (USPRI) database with more than 525 million names, addresses, ages, and possible family relationships of people who lived in the United States between roughly 1950 and 1990.  This will be an invaluable tool in piecing together family stories and histories.  This new addition will replace the current USPRI database on Ancestry which is mainly profiles of living people. This database is built from a variety of city directories and other public records.

Third, we launched search results and links to living people records on MyLife.com.  We are excited about this partnership because MyLife has a much better collection of records about living people and continues to update this collection.  MyLife.com includes current public information and more than 700 million profiles of living people. They are much better equipped to offer these services than we are. If you want to find a living cousin or second cousin or other living relative we believe these links to MyLife will be the best service to help you contact your family.

Finally, we launched a new obituary collection.  We have had several very popular obituary collections for several years.  We have now upgraded our collection that we extract from obituaries posted in newspapers around the world with much better fielding and from more papers.  This should help you more easily identify the right obituary and find family relationships.

In the coming months look for additional signficant improvements to all the US Federal Census from 1800 to 1890. We will also continue to release millions of vital records every month.  We are also excited about the upcoming large addition to our newspaper and military collections over the next few months.

We hope these additions help you discover more of your family story.

Is it that we have had so few records from Central and South America that people that come from those places do not visit Ancestry?

Is it that they just have lower interest in Genealogy?

I actually spent a few years living in Argentina and learned to really appreciate the people. I felt like they were generally very interested in their family history but I didn’t really focus on this. I am still a little surprised to not see more interest in these records. If you have any insights into this we would appreciate your feedback.

Thanks for working with us.

GG

Newspapers can be an amazing gem of a resource. In addition to obituaries, birth and marriage announcements the papers frequently have interesting stories about military service, financial matters and other personal stories.

Another side of interest is how the world events affected the towns where your ancestors lived. 

 Newspapers have not been highly used on Ancestry to date.  We would love to hear from you about this new collection of newspapers. Is it of interest to you? Do you want more? Do you want a specific time or place? Do you like a diversity of records like this or would you rather just have us focus most of our efforts on vitals?

We appreciate your feedback.

GG

• Name at Birth
• Birth Date
• Birth Place
• Residence
• Naturalization (if foreign-born)
• Spouse Name
• Occupation
• and some of the newer applications include marriage and family information

I would love to hear of any success you may have when this collection is released.

GG

We just completed a survey of over 10,000 Ancestry.com (mostly US-based) customers and learned what US content we should emphasize for 2008. I would like to get additional individual input, suggestions and comments from others to refine what we do. Here are two of the interesting findings:

1) Customers record type priority list was first additional birth, marriage and death records followed by more census, immigration, military, court, trees and newspapers.

2) Customers want to be informed of new interesting content additions by email weekly/monthly (most wanted monthly). I was surprised daily wasn’t wanted by most.

We have some very exciting new content that is in our content “pipeline” right now. I am looking forward to releasing great new offerings with a huge emphasis on vital records, lots of additional state censuses and some very useful and interesting augmentations to the federal census, huge immigration additions, and a very rich military release (similar to our military promotion last May).

I would love to hear what content you want most.

GG