After listening, researching and testing with members, we decided to make the hot key experience in new search the default method for refining searches.
(Note: I got my dates wrong, it’s Tuesday, November 10th…so just a little more waiting.)
This change will happen on Monday, November 9th, sometime during the day.
The information you enter into your original [...]

Thank you for your participation in the search strategies webinar. We had a wonderful turnout with thousands of comments and questions. We answered as many questions as time allowed. We have a list of the questions asked during the webinar and we’ll be posting answers to the most popular questions and topic areas.

There were many questions about the card catalog and about topics that can be researched using the card catalog.

Hi everyone
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 [...]

Hi Everyone,
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 [...]

Hello everyone,
The search team is excited about our free online webinar about searching Ancestry.com on October 14th at 8:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time. In this webinar, we will show you the best strategies for searching Ancestry.com’s thousands of databases. Improving your search strategies will help you to find more information about your ancestors.
It can take [...]

More data collections launched with the enhanced image page
We launched more data collections in the new enhanced image viewer yesterday. Here is the list of data collections that are currently available in the new format:

1871 Census of Canada
1870 United States Federal Census
1871 Wales Census
1871 England Census
1871 Isle of Man Census
1871 Channel Islands Census
1860 [...]

New vs Old Search
I know this isn’t really about the enhanced image page, but some of you have ended up in in the New Search interface and would like to go back to old. If at the top of the Ancestry.com search homepage you see this:

If you haven’t seen the enhanced image page yet, you can take a look at this image from the US 1860 census. And to get you started with the basics, here are a few tips.
Viewing just the image
If you want to view just the image, click on the link. Until you click the [...]

Tomorrow, July 29th, we are launching two enhancements. The first is enhanced editing of index data, and the second is an enhanced version of the image page.
Enhanced editing
One of the most frequent requests from our members is to have the ability to add alternates to more than just given names and surnames. The [...]

We have been working on a few enhancements for the image page to make it easier for you to read what is on the page, and then to add your own knowledge about your ancestors to our indexes.
Here’s a preview (click the image to see a larger version):

First, we’ve added some tools to help you [...]