Here is a side by side comparison of the changes we made:

The new design allows you to view and filter to categories with a single click.

The new design makes the toggle between the record view and the category view of your search results more prominent – and it functions with only a single click.

Database titles are now in bold, making it easier to skim through your search results looking for specific records.

If you have specific feedback about the new design – what do you like, what don’t you like – please let us know by taking the survey available at the top of your search results page.

Don’t give up so easily. Turns out that story of true love could be hiding in a yearbook or a census record. Or it may be waiting in a document or photo that you’ve already found, viewed, and saved … just waiting for you to take a second look.

Here are some places where we found love stories, what we discovered, and which resources might unlock the tales of romance you’re looking for, too.
 
The Girl Next Door

Anne Mitchell, Sr. Product Manager, Library and Institutional Accounts

Tip: Explore the pages before and after your ancestor in the census to see if you find the prospective bride or groom living nearby.

Charlton Wallace married Martha Jane Cash in Rockbridge County, Virginia, in 1842. According to her death record, Martha was the daughter of Ready Cash and Mary Hartigan of Rockbridge County.  Unfortunately vital records weren’t kept at the time of Charlton’s birth or death, so I had to do a little digging to find his parents. I knew from his tombstone that Charlton was born in Rockbridge County in 1823 and died there in 1903, so Rockbridge County seemed a good place to start.

Identifying the family would be tricky since the 1840 census listed only heads of households by name, with children simply tallied by number and age range. Assuming Charlton was living with his parents in 1840—and that they lived in Rockbridge County, where he was born, married, and died—I narrowed the Wallace households that had a boy in the correct age range down to three.

Browsing the neighbors of one of the candidates gave me a very big clue as to the likely identity of Charlton’s probable parents, or at least the folks he was living with. As I paged back to the previous census page, living next door to William Wallace I found the household of Ready Cash. Since then I’ve found further evidence that makes it pretty clear that Charlton married the girl next door.

William Wallace household, 1840 U.S. Census, Rockbridge Co., Virginia

Ready Cash household, 1840 U.S. Census, Rockbridge Co., Virginia

Shipmates for Life?

Juliana Smith, Sr. Marketing and Communications Associate

Tip: Browse through the passenger lists of immigrant ancestors to see if a future couple was traveling together or met on board.

My great-great-grandmother Margaret Dooner was a first-generation American born in Brooklyn, New York, in January 1841. Her parents were Irish immigrants, and her baptism record from St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church lists her parents as John Dooner and Eliza Moran. Since Dooner is a relatively unusual name by Irish standards, I thought I would try to locate John’s arrival in the U.S. in U.S. passenger lists. Using the 1841 birth date of the couple’s eldest child, Margaret, as a starting point, I limited my search to the years prior to that and found a John Dooner who is just about the right age coming to New York on July 10, 1839. I glanced at the others on the page and found a number of twenty-somethings, most of whom appear to be traveling without family, although there were a few young families sprinkled in.

Since the manifest was only two pages long, I scanned the other names on the list, and although there were no other Dooners, I ran across an Eliza Moran on the following page. Because Moran is a common surname, I will have to gather more evidence to prove this is John’s Eliza. It’s also possible that they were coming from the same area of Ireland and knew each other before immigrating. But in either case it’s a fun find and will be interesting to investigate just where love may have bloomed.

Ship “Ganges,” arriving at New York 10 July 1839, p. 1

Ship “Ganges,” arriving at New York 10 July 1839, p. 2

He Joined the What?

Loretto “Lou” Szucs, Vice President, Community Relations

Tip: If your ancestor served in the military, his pension file could include surprising personal details. Some military pension records and indexes can be found online at Ancestry.com and Fold3.com.

When my daughter and I uncovered my great-grandmother Jane Howley’s file for a Civil War pension based on her husband, Thomas’s, service in the Union Navy, we hit the jackpot. The file, found in the Navy Widows’ Certificates collection on Fold3.com, provided great genealogical details, as well as a number of depositions from family and friends.

A deposition by friend Margaret Freil, who knew Jane and Thomas before they were married, even revealed how they met:

I first became acquainted with Thomas Howley sometime about 1855 or 1856. He came to our house on Water St. near Fulton Ferry, Brooklyn, N.Y.  about that time and boarded with my parents. He was called a greenhorn then and I understand that he had just came here from England. My father introduced Thomas Howley to this claimant Jane Howley, whom I knew as long as I can remember.

I even learned a little bit about the early years of their marriage. There are 123 pages in the file, largely because Thomas enlisted using his mother’s maiden name of Moore, which left Jane with some explaining to do. She says,

 I objected to him going in the service because I was then with child and I did not think it was right for him to go. I did not know he had enlisted until after he went in the recovery ship and then I was told by Lou Barnett, who enlisted him, and brought his civilian clothes back to me. Yes sir, this man Barnett enlisted him, and I understand he got half of the bounty money.

Jane went to see Thomas a couple days later.

I asked him why he enlisted under the name of Moore and he said he did not want me to know it till he had enlisted and he then handed me $400 half of the bounty money he had received.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall for that meeting. Jane goes on in a later deposition to tell us that following his enlistment, “I felt very sore over it because I had one small child and was with child at the time.”

This is just a small sample of the details that we found in that file. The depositions are full of insights into the lives of all involved, and the clues we found will no doubt lead to more information.

Check for pension indexes and images of some files online at Ancestry.com and Fold3.com. If you find the record in an index, you can request the record from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

Other Resources

Newspapers. Check newspapers for engagement, marriage, and anniversary announcements that could include the story of how the happy couple met. Social pages may list the names of people at events and give you insights into their social circles.

You may even find articles with incredible details about an ancestor’s love story. The following article appeared in the New Castle News (New Castle, Pennsylvania) of 9 December 1910.

“New Castle News” (New Castle, Pennsylvania) of 9 December 1910

Maps. Find your ancestors street addresses in city directories, censuses beginning in 1880, and other records and plot locations on a map. Contemporary maps can give you a general sense of a location, although bear in mind that streets may have been renamed or renumbered. Historical maps, like those found in the following collections, can be even more useful:

• U.S., Indexed County Land Ownership Maps, 1860–1918
• Historic Land Ownership and Reference Atlases, 1507–2000

From U.S., Indexed County Land Ownership Maps, 1860–1918, Carbon County, Pennsylvania, 1875

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Update your email preferences to have articles like this one delivered directly to your email. To sign up for this free service, click on your Ancestry.com account profile, and select Email Preferences. Then check the box for the Ancestry Monthly Update.

If you are looking for the specific origins of your Irish immigrant ancestors here are a few of my favorite tips and tricks for finding the exact piece of land your forefathers called home on the “auld sod.”

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Exhaust all U.S. resources first

As tempted as we are to jump right into Irish research, do all the U.S. research you can first.  This will save you from beating your head against the proverbial brick wall as you try to sort through all of the John O’Briens and William Kellys you will find.

Use records like naturalizations, obituaries, military service records and newspaper articles. Be sure to search for records regarding the children of your immigrant ancestor as well. You never know when the obituary of one of those children will list the birthplace of their father.

Research the lives and origins of the whole family. Also pay attention to friends, associates and neighbors. Who lived near, worked with, and worshipped with your ancestors? Could they have all come over from the same place in Ireland?

Once you have a location in Ireland, it will be much easier to narrow in on your ancestor in available Irish records.

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Educate yourself about the Irish census records and census substitutes

The Irish censuses of 1821-1851 were destroyed in an explosion in 1922 during the Irish Civil War. The 1861-1891 censuses were also destroyed. The remaining censuses are 1901 and 1911. These are available for free at http://census.nationalarchives.ie.

There are some substitutes and other resources to help get around the missing census records. Which takes me to our next tip…

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Check Irish record collections available on Ancestry.com

Go to the Card Catalog. Filter by location to Europe | Ireland. That will give you a complete listing of all databases containing Irish records. Filter by collection to see the different types of records available. There are over 28 million Irish records online at Ancestry.com as of the writing of this post. Be sure to explore all 150+ database titles to see which ones might be pertinent to your family history. And, when you click through to a database you are interested in, be sure to scroll down past the search box to read the database description.

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Look for free resources available online elsewhere

A couple of my other favorite free resources for Irish research are:

Missing Friends Advertisements in the Boston Pilot – These advertisements were placed by people looking for immigrants who came to the United States.  Many list the relationship to the person they are looking for and the town in Ireland they came from.  These records cover the years 1831-1921 and can be found at http://infowanted.bc.edu.

Will calendars for Armagh, Belfast and Londonderry from 1858-1943 can be found at the website for the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland.  Abstracts from these records contain not just the name of the deceased but sometimes names of family members the left for America as well.

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Watch the Find Your Irish Ancestors in America & Ireland webinar for more clues and tips

Under the Learning Center on Ancestry.com, you will find Webinars. There is one there called Find Your Irish Ancestors in America and Ireland. This is a full hour of great ideas from two of the best Irish genealogists around.  Be sure to watch this for more tips and tricks to finding your Irish ancestors as well as some ideas for learning more about them in Irish records.

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For a quick tutorial on how to use some of the resources mentioned in this blog post, feel free to watch the Ancestry LIVE broadcast I did earlier today.

Now, I just need to find some time to sort out what I know about my great-great-grandfather, John O’Brien, who was born in either Ireland or Ohio in either 1829 or 1835.  (The man couldn’t keep his story straight.)

Until next time…

P.S. One other free resource that we discussed in the chat after the broadcast is GenUKI.

1890 U.S. Population Density

For those of us who use census records as the beginning steps for sketching out the structure of our families, that gap between 1880 and 1900 seems huge and, sometimes, insurmountable.  A lot can happen in twenty years.

There are plenty of other records available that can help you trace your family through the end of the 19th century.  Here are a few of my favorite.

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State Census Records

Many states took censuses on “off” years from the federal government, most commonly on the “fives.”  Using the Card Catalog, do a title search for “State Census” and see what comes up.  To solve the 1880-1900 gap challenge, look specifically for censuses taken in 1885 or 1895.  As of now we have the following censuses for that time period online at Ancestry.com:

• Colorado (1885)
• Florida (1885)
• Iowa (1885, 1895)
• Kansas (1885, 1895)
• Michigan (1884, 1894)
• Minnesota (1885, 1895)
• Nebraska (1885)
• New Jersey (1895)
• New York (1892)
• South Dakota (1895)

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City Directories

While these will likely only list the adults in the household (and sometimes only the head of household), city directories are a great resource for tracking your family through the 1880s and 90s.  Using the Card Catalog, filter to directories, then state, then decade to see what is available.  Once you find a person you are looking for, try a surname search on the same street to see who else shows up in the same neighborhood or place of employment.

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Newspapers

Newspapers are another great way to track your family, especially if they came from a smaller community where local happenings were big news.  Be sure to check out the large newspaper collection on Ancestry.com – again, using the Card Catalog, filter to Newspapers, then state, then decade to see what shows up in the same time and place as your family.

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If you want a quick video tutorial about searching the state censuses and the city directories, watch my Ancestry LIVE broadcast from earlier today.

Until next time – Have fun climbing your family tree…

Where can you try it out?

This beta viewer is available for the following censuses:

• 1930 US Federal Census: http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=6224
• 1911 Channel Islands Census: http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2355
• 1911 Wales Census: http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2353
• 1911 Isle of Man Census: http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2354
• 1911 England Census: http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2352

You can access the interactive image beta viewer from the record page by clicking on “View Interactive Image (BETA).”

How can you send feedback?

Please use the “Send comments” link at the top of the viewer.

What’s new?

Family Highlights

Highlights help you find people quickly by automatically highlighting the entire household.  This is most useful when there are multiple families on one image.

• Yellow highlight – Whether you selected someone from your tree or searched for someone new, that person is highlighted in yellow when viewing his or her record in the Interactive Image Viewer.
• Green highlight – If the person that is highlighted in yellow is in a household that has any other members, the other members of the household are highlighted in green.
• Orange highlight – An orange highlight is placed on any row that is not already highlighted in green or yellow when your mouse hovers over that row. This will only show up when there are multiple families in a household.

Informative Tips

By hovering over various cells, you can see a transcription of that cell and learn more about the facts in the record. Simply hover your mouse over an element of the record and a text tip appears.

Name Label Overlay
When you zoom in on an image, names labels will appear on the left side of the viewer so you can see exactly whose information you’re viewing.

Moving the image

The new image viewer has many features that are similar to the Advanced Image Viewer many of you are already using.  We’ve also added some new features.

• Click and Drag – Click anywhere on the image, hold down your mouse button, and drag your mouse in the direction that you wish to pan the image.
• Onscreen Controls – Use the arrow buttons to pan the image left, right, up, or down.  Additionally, you can use the magnifying glass buttons at the top of the onscreen controls or the slider at the bottom of the onscreen controls to zoom in or out of the image.
• Keyboard Controls – Use the arrow keys on your keyboard.  This will enable you to pan left, right, up, or down.  You may also use the “+” or “-” keys on your keyboard to zoom in or out.  Press the “Home” key to move your current view to the far left of the current image.  Press the “End” key to move your current view to the far right of the current image.  Press the “Page Up” key to move to the top of the current image.  Press the “Page Down” key to move to the bottom of the current image.
• Mouse Wheel Zoom – If your mouse has a mouse wheel, you can use it to zoom in or out of the image.

Actions Menu

Use the Actions menu to print, view record source, remove highlighting, and more.  Please note that this interactive image viewer is still in beta and some of the features you may be used to seeing are not available yet.

Print – Print the image or the current view.

• View highlighting – By default, household highlights are displayed on the image.  Select this menu item to disable household highlights.
• View source – Select this menu item to open the source panel and learn which organization provided the image.

We have also added some new options under the “Image controls” section of the actions menu.

• Rotate Clockwise and Rotate CounterClockwise - These menu items will rotate the image by 90 degrees in either the clockwise or counterclockwise direction.
• Flip Horizontally and Flip Vertically - These menu items will flip the image.
• Invert Colors - This option will reverse the colors of the image (black becomes white, white becomes black).  In some cases, this will improve the readability of the image.
• Increase and Decrease Contrast - Use the increase or decrease contrast menu items to improve the contrast on the image.

What features are coming soon?

• Index panel – See a transcription of the key fields underneath the image.
• Change locations by browsing – Change the focus of your browsing by selecting a new location directly from the image browse path.
• Improvements to save to tree – Saving to tree is available but the features which recognize whether you have come from a hint or if you have already saved this image are not implemented yet.
• Comments and corrections – We will add the ability to provide comments and corrections soon. We value all of your additions to our records.
• Sharing – Sharing the image via email, Facebook, or Twitter is coming soon.

Thank you for your input and suggestions on the beta version of the interactive image viewer.   We will be making many updates to this viewer in the upcoming weeks to add more new features and the other “coming soon” features listed above.

I’ve been doing genealogy research professionally for almost a decade now. When clients are paying you by the hour, you learn lots of really great shortcuts to keep you moving along and focused. The big tip I shared on Thursday’s episode of The Barefoot Genealogist? (Drumroll, please.)

Professional Genealogists Create Research Plans

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1. What do I want to know?

Be really specific about exactly what it is you are looking for. This helps you stay focused and is the key to the rest of the plan.

Bad: Where do my Woodruff’s come from?

Better: Where was my ggg-grandfather born?

Best: John Woodruff was probably born about 1831 in Ohio. Who were his parents?

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2. What do I already know?

3. How do I know it?

These two questions go together. And, I often bounce back and forth between them repeatedly until I’ve exhausted everything I already know about the person in question. I also make sure I’ve recorded everything I know about their spouse and children.

I like to put this information into the notes section of the person profile in Family Tree Maker. I enter the notes chronologically based on the person’s life (not based on the order in which I found the records). You can see an example of how I do that at 7:22 in the video.

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4. Where could I possibly find what I want to know?

5. Do the records exist? If so, where?

Again, we have a pair of questions that work well together. Create a list of records you could search – census, military, vitals, immigration, etc. Then do a search in the Ancestry Wiki for the place and record type to see if what you need exists. Also, be sure to check the Ancestry Card Catalog to see if what you want exists ONLINE at Ancestry.com

For those of you who are new to this fun and fascinating adventure called genealogy, I hope you find this helpful. For those of you who’ve been doing it a while maybe this will give you a renewed focus to break through that brick wall you’ve been struggling with.

Feel free to PIN this graphic so you have it available to you. Or, you could even print it out and put it near your computer so you make sure not to skip any steps.

Bonus Tip: Look for a local genealogical society to join. You will find friends who are willing to help and offer fresh perspectives on your genealogy brick walls.

Until next time – Have fun climbing your family tree…

I love discovering my ancestors and tracking down their descendants. I climb up a branch of my family tree to a set of 3rd or 4th great-grandparents and then back down again finding all of their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, right down to those living cousins. I enjoy chasing families through census records, seeing where they pop up and what their family looks like decade after decade.

But, birth, marriage and death records provide more concrete boundaries to the lives my ancestors and their families lived. These records provide anchor events that I can use to build complete family histories as I chase my relatives up the family tree and out the branches. If census records are the cornerstone of good genealogy research, then vital records are the capstone.

With that said, you can probably imagine what a week like this, with so many new vital records resources being made available all at once, does to my attention span. It’s been all I could do to avoid the BMD search page during work hours this week. I’ve been good and gone to bed at a decent hour every night with barely a peek at two or three or seven of these databases. But, the weekend is FINALLY here!  Hours and hours of uninterrupted searching are within sight.

I want to track my maternal grandmother’s family through Arkansas and Missouri then back into Tennessee.

I want to find my paternal grandfather’s relatives in Ohio and West Virginia.

I want to see if I can find my 4th great-grandparents marriage record. Will it be in Pennsylvania? Maybe Virginia?

Oh, and, what about those “lost” cousins I’ve been looking for? Did they end up in Michigan or Minnesota?

MUST. FOCUS.

Here’s the plan. I’ve printed a copy of the page that lists all of the new databases. I’m just going to start at the top and work my way down, checking them off as I go. For each database I’ll do a filtered search in my Family Tree Maker file to see which families were living in that state during the time period listed. Then I’ll search that database to see if I can get dates for the vital events in their lives. I’ll also be sure to search birth records by parents’ names only to make sure all the children in a family are accounted for. Oh, and I’ll search marriage records by the name of each spouse individually to make sure there aren’t other marriages recorded. And then I’ll need to…

There just aren’t enough hours in the weekend, I’m afraid. But, I guess there are worse problems than having too many records and too little time. It just means I may have to cut my date short tonight so I can get started a little sooner. (Hey – I said, cut it short, not cancel. I can control my genealogy addiction obsession habit passion. Whatever.)

So, talk to me.  What’s your plan for checking out these databases? Who are you looking for AND where do you think you will find them?

Until next time – Have fun climbing around in your family tree, no matter which direction you decide to go!

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 this feedback, we’ve been making some changes to the forms over the past months, and this week we’re beginning to roll out one of the most significant changes.

Really new to search?

We’ve created a tutorial on YouTube, How to Search for Historical Records on Ancestry.com to help those of you who are new genealogy searching.

What’s changed?

Previously, we’ve asked you to enter the name of the person you’re looking for, together with the birth and death dates and locations.

One of the requests we’ve had is for location to be more flexible – perhaps you don’t know where your grandparents were born in 1905, but do know they lived in Kentucky in 1960.

So we’ve added a single box that asks for any “place your ancestor might have lived”, and which searches our records for any life events that match that location, including birth, residence, marriage, military service and death.

Most importantly, in our tests with volunteer members, we found that in a number of cases, this change enabled us to surface relevant records higher in our results than was possible before.

Of course, you can still specify birth and death places by clicking on “Add an event”. In fact, these links give you a much more flexible way to add in any of the details you know about the life events or relationships of the person you’re looking for. We’ve tried to make it a little bit easier to enter as much or as little as you know.

Estimated birth year

To search the right collections, we need to know roughly the period of time in which your person was alive. To help us find the most likely records for a person, enter the approximate birth year, or click on “Calculate it” to make an educated guess if you’re not sure.

Show advanced and clear form

The links for advanced search and clear form are now located at the bottom of the form next to the Search button.

Looking for Old Search?

Old search is still there. Go to the search homepage : http://search.ancestry.com/search. Under the navigation bar on the right, you’ll see a link, “Go to Old Search”. Click on this, and you’ll be back on the Old Search form.

Happy Searching!

• Updated new search homepage
• Browse the Place Pages 

I thought it might be worth discussing a few more of the features in greater detail.  

Recent Searches 

When you are logged in, we remember and display the last 4 searches you did. To find them, look beneath the search form for Recent Searches.  You may have to do a few searches before you see recent ones.  When you click the names, we will redo the same search that you did in the past.  If you are trying to recreate a search that you did beyond your last four searches, click “See More” on the right side of this section. 

On the Recent Searches homepage, you can see your last 100 searches. They are organized chronologically by date.  You can see when you did the search, what information you provided, and in which category you were searching.  Clicking on a name will redo the search. Clicking the trash can will delete the search. 

Recently Viewed Collections 

Sometimes, you are focused on just a few data collections for a person or family group.  You may do a lot of reasearch in just those collections.  Recently Viewed Collections is designed to help you quickly get back to those data collections by placing them on the top right side of the search homepage. We display the names of the last three data collection homepages you visited. 

Similar to Recent Searches, you can also see a longer list of the data collection homepages that you have visited.  Click “See More” to go to a longer list of data collections.  You can see the name of the data collection, the category, and the date you last viewed the collection homepage.  Click on a data collection name to go directly to that collection home page. You can also delete any titles that you don’t want keep in your list of recently viewed collections.  

Just a few tips to help you return to your research quickly after you’ve stepped away.  I hope you give them a try.

You’ll find we’ve modifed the search forms just a bit to make entering that information just a bit easier.

The updated form may not look that different, but the difference is all in the “Add an Event”:

Click on “Add an Event” and you will see a list of other events you can quickly add to your search. These events aren’t cluttering up the form if you don’t need them, but when you do want to use them in a search, they are just a click away.

Category and Subcategory Forms

You’ll also notice some changes on category and subcategory forms.

Previously when you looked at the Birth, Marriage and Death Category the search form was a bit long and even in advanced didn’t give you the granularity around dates that many researchers would like to have.

So we tightened up the form, and where we’ve got it indexed, we allow you to do searches with days and months instead of just years:

Data Collection Search Forms

Over the last couple of years talking to our members on the boards, blogs and at conferences, one of the most requested changes to new search was specifically in the Social Security Death Index. You wanted to be able to search by Day Month and Year. You now can, in either simple or advanced mode:

Any Event

You may have noticed the “Any Event” option on some of these forms. Sometimes you don’t know for sure exactly how the event was listed. If you enter a year or location into an “Any Event” search field, we will look for any event that is about person you are searching for: birth, death, military, you name it.

As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts about the forms.

Happy Searching!