Ancestry.com Blog » Gary Gibb

Why such little interest in Central and South American records?

Gary Gibb — Fri, 23 May 2008 15:24:39 +0000

We have run many surveys regarding content interest around the world. We consistently see relatively small interest in content from Central and South America. We have a huge number of people that have ancestors from these areas both in the United States and in those countries. We have some opportunities to get many more records from these areas but the interest from current customers seems very low. I would love to understand more about this discrepancy - meaning a high number of people but very low interest.

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.

Huge Newspaper Addition Coming…

Gary Gibb — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:26:13 +0000

We are excited to release a very large and very significant addition to our newspaper collection. It will double the size of our current collection. We are also improving our search experience with newspapers to help you find the information you are looking for.

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.

US Passports Coming Soon…

Gary Gibb — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 01:27:37 +0000

We have a fun collection coming very soon to Ancestry.com. It is a US passport collection with millions of names from the years 1796 to 1925. Passports became more popular in the late 1840s. In 1914, American citizens were permitted to travel abroad without passports. If your ancestors were travelers this will be a great collection for you. If you find a hit for one of your ancestors you will get a little gold mine of information. Many of these applications include photos. The applications can reveal:

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.

US Content Survey Results

Gary Gibb — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 13:12:33 +0000

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.