Right now, Ancestry.com Labs will be linked only from relevant blog posts, but in the future, it’s possible we may introduce a permanent link from the Ancestry.com main site.

The projects we will place in this area may be in beta (like Ancestry Wiki) or they may be early prototypes. Some of these may make their way into the main Ancestry.com site, others may not. Much depends on your feedback.

The first prototype that we’re launching today is codenamed “Person View” and we’re testing two new ideas:

1.     Person consolidation – can we group records and trees together in a way that exposes the relationships between records in a completely new way?

2.     Web records – can we find records on the web that match your query (from outside of Ancestry.com’s collections), and then link you directly to them?

You can access Person View from the labs website through this URL: http://www.ancestry.com/labs and you can see a quick demo of how Person View works here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vtgw8RnRHAI. Please give it a try and let us know what you think.

About Person consolidation:

Person consolidation allows you to access our collections in a completely new way. Our aim is to search our records and trees to find a matching “person” and then give you direct access to the records that support the facts about that person  – many factors affect whether this works well – the time period, the location and whether the person is already represented in our trees. We want to experiment with this across as wide a range of people as possible, and we’d love to hear whether it works for your ancestors.

About Web records:

Across the web, the number of sites that are transcribing and publishing historical records is growing all of the time.  Many of these are freely available. Person View helps you find links to sites that contain records matching your search.

However, in providing access to these, it’s very important to us that we are respectful to the publishers of these websites. We’d like to be completely transparent about how we intend to do this:

• Our goal is to make it easy for our users to find websites that have records they may be interested in, and to make it easy for them to visit these websites.
• To do this we will build an index of essential information in the record (e.g. the website link, the matching name, date, place), and make this available to our users through our search tools.
• We will always strive to follow web industry standards for website crawling permissions.  For example, some sites contain a robots.txt file telling search engines (such as Google) not to crawl that site.
• We will put in place processes to remove the content from our search index if the website/content owner requests, with the goal of doing this as quickly as possible. We will clearly publish how to contact our team to do this (our contact us page has more details).
• We may allow our users to save a reference to the record to their family trees, but whenever this information is later presented, we intend to give proper attribution, with a clear reference or link to the site from which the index data came.

We welcome your feedback on any aspect of the experience, and look forward to hearing from you. There is a feedback link on the right hand side of every page of the Person View site.

If you are a website owner, and want to see what other content owners are saying, please visit our publishers message boards (you will need to have a free registration with Ancestry.com to post on this board, but you can browse what people are saying without being registered). If you think we should be including your website in the search, or if you wish us to remove your site from the web index, you can email our team directly.

We’d love to hear from you.

The Ancestry Labs team

First of all, I’d like to say thanks to all of you who have put time into helping us, posting to your feedback on the blogs, on our message boards, during usability studies, at conferences, in focus groups, those who we have visited in your own homes, and especially those who have contributed to the user group which reviewed the early prototypes.

What we heard was that Ancestry Search needs to give you more control of your searches, more relevant results, better ways to find our data collections, and ways to search more efficiently.  Based on your input, over the coming weeks and months, we’re planning on making a number of changes to the way search works.

Here are some of the areas we’ll be changing:

Search homepage – We’ll be developing a new genealogy search form, a clickable map, links to all our content categories, and new features to help you find information you’ve seen in the past.

Explore by Location – We’ll be offering a new browse experience for data collections by country, state, or county.

Recent Activity – We’ll be introducing new ways to keep track of recent searches and the collections you have browsed to recently. You can restart your research more quickly after taking a break with these new tools.

Search Forms – We’ll be making some changes to both the basic and advanced search forms – some elements will be launched in advanced search this week, others are still work in progress.  We’ve tried to find new ways to help you enter the information you know more easily and give you more control over the results you get back.

For those of you who are using “old search”, we are not proposing any changes. However, we hope you’ll give the new tools a go as we launch them onto the “new search” site, and be open to trying new ways to see if you can find elusive ancestors that maybe the new tools can help you uncover… we’ve paid special attention to feedback from users of “old search” and hope you’ll find this reflected in the upcoming changes.

You can find take the tour by clicking here: http://landing.ancestry.com/search/tour/

We’re still in the process of finalizing the design, and we want to hear what you think. Please take the tour, and give us your feedback by filling out a survey at the end.

This issue causes a delay of several seconds  in the “preview” of newspapers and other images within the search results, it also affects the loading of the image when you “hover” over the result title.

It does not affect which results are returned, however, we have had reports that it is impacting the speed of  complete images in the image viewer.

We are aware of the issue, and are working to resolve it as soon as possible

We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Thanks to those who joined us for the Search webinar on Wednesday. We had more than 10,700 members registered for the event, which is a record ever for Ancestry.com.

We also appreciate all of the great questions. In total, we had over 1,500, so unfortunately, we’re not going to be able to address these all individually.

In this post, and over the next few days, we’ll be covering some of the common themes:

1. Can I watch the presentation again?

• Yes, you can watch our recording of the webinar by clicking here

2. Can I just see the slides? I don’t want to have to watch the whole webinar

• We will be making these slides available shortly. I’ll provide an update on this blog as soon as we’ve posted them.

3. Where can I find a list of hot keys?

• We always show a list of hot keys on every results page, on the left hand side, below the “collections”.

• In addition, you can find an overview of hot keys in our blog post  here

4. How do I make a correction if I have information about one of my ancestors that doesn’t match what is transcribed on the record?

• Nobody knows your ancestors as well as you do.  If you know an alternate name, date or place, you can add that to the record. Once you’ve made the correction, anyone searching in the future will be able to find that record based on either your alternate, or the original transcription

You can access this from the record pages:

or on the new image view page, on those collections where it is available:

• For a more in depth overview of this, see Anne’s post about how corrections work here

5. Where is the best place to start when researching African American family history?

• We have a special feature on African American ancestry that provides information and tips here

6. Where can I find the substitute collections for 1890 (which was lost) or 1940 (which isn’t released until 2012) censuses?

• Because these collections are not available, we have compiled a number of sources, including city directories and state censuses that cover the years that would have been in these censuses. Using these, you may be able to fill in gaps and track down who was living where at those times.  Our 1940 substitute in particular contains a huge collection of city directories from about 1935 to 1945 and has over 100 million names.
• For more information on 1940 see our blog post here
• These are available via the census and voter list page or you can find them directly by clicking here for 1890 or here for 1940

7. How do you reduce hits outside of the specified date?

• If you provide us with a birth, death or other date in the record, we will calculate when that person could have been alive, and only return records that could fall into that date range. You can find a detailed explanation of how this works in our post here.
• There are some examples where some dates may appear outside of this range, for example some family histories. However, if you find a specific example we’d be grateful if you could let us know so we can look into it.

8. When I go to Ancestry.com, my pages don’t look the same as the ones you showed in the webinar, why not?

• Last year, we launched a new search interface, which had a new layout and some additional features, some of which we discussed in the webinar. If you have started using Ancestry.com since last July, it’s likely you are using the new search interface.
• However, following feedback from experienced users (including much debate on this board) we have continued to make the “Old” search available for those users who joined before this time. If you did not recognise the pages we showed, you might be using “Old Search”
• The webinar was aimed at beginner to intermediate users, so it focused on the tools available in New search.

If you are using Old search, your screen will look like this, with a link to new search at the top right hand side of the page.

• At any time, you can return to old search by clicking on the same link in the same position.

9.  Is Tony from Yorkshire, Indiana, or New Zealand…?

• Some good guesses… but not right, I’m from Hereford, England and moved with my family to California in 2007

10. This webinar was too basic for me – will you be doing an “advanced” webinar?

• We’ve been really pleased that the majority of people found this webinar useful, and we are now considering options for extending this.
• In discussing within the team, it seems to make sense that a more advanced webinar should focus on particular topics, ie Searching for records in the South or Searching using specific collections. We’d love to get your ideas on what might be most useful to the greatest number of people.

Tony

I’d like to remind everybody that we will be running a free webinar on the best Strategies for Searching Ancestry.com this evening at 8:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time.

This webinar is designed for beginning to intermediate members of Ancestry.com. To attend the webinar, please register here.

We’re delighted that we already have more than 10,000 registrants – and look forward to have you all join us this evening.

Tony