Ancestry.com Searches: A Behind the Scenes Look, presented by John Bacus
Wednesday, 23 May 2012, 8 PM ET

Learn how search at Ancestry.com works AND get an inside view of tricks you’ll need to take full advantage of its power. John Bacus, Ancestry.com Search Product Manager, walks you through the tech side and presents you with plenty of tips, advice and even a few workarounds—all of which will help you make your next search at Ancestry.com more effective, productive, and better than ever.

John is a Principal Product Manager at Ancestry.com, where he is responsible for the core search features of the site, such as search forms and search results. Prior to his time at Ancestry.com, he held search-related product management roles at AltaVista and eBay. John’s interest in genealogy was first piqued with the family history his grandparents put together when he was a child, and has enjoyed validating and building upon the research they did with two curious minds, some spare time, and a motor home.
Click here to register. 

Common Surnames: Finding Your Smith, presented by Juliana Smith
Thursday, 24 May 2012, 3 PM ET
Despite his common moniker, your ancestor was unique. Get the tools and tips you need to find your ancestors with common surnames in this free one-hour class with Juliana Smith. In this class you’ll learn how to craft the best search on Ancestry.com, and how to save your findings in a way that makes it easy to pick your family out of the crowd.

Juliana has been working for Ancestry.com for just shy of 14 years and began her family history journey trolling through microfilms at the tender age of 11 with her mother. She is a certificate holder in the Boston University Genealogical Research program, and wrote the “Computers and Technology” chapter of The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy. Her favorite part of family history is discovering the stories in the records of her ancestors.
Click here to register.

Forward thinking: Tracing the children of your ancestors. And their children… presented by Crista Cowan
Friday, 25 May 2012, 1 PM ET
Are you stuck in your march back through time identifying ancestors? Turn around. Revitalize your research. Rekindle your desire to continue with some success. Descendancy research utilizes much of the same methodology as ancestral research but can lead to a whole new way of looking at your genealogy. Often it can lead to discovery of cousins who have missing pieces of the puzzle needed to complete your picture of common ancestors.

Crista Cowan has been doing genealogy since she was a child and has been an Ancestry.com employee since 2004. Known as the Barefoot Genealogist, Crista brings her passion for family history into her presentations and provides common sense solutions for the challenges we face in the search for our ancestors.
Click here to register.

All events will be archived, and if you register, you’ll get an email from us alerting you when the archived version becomes available to view at your convenience.

Then join us again on Thursday, May 17 at 8pm ET as Juliana Szucs Smith presents Get More Clues from a Census Record.

Both classes are absolutely free but registration before each event is required (bonus: when you register, you’ll get an email reminder about the presentation as well as an email informing you when the class is available for viewing online after the presentation airs – even if you weren’t able to attend the live broadcast). You can register for a class by selecting its name above.

And be sure to stick around until the end. Both Juliana and Crista will pick a handful of questions from the audience and give you their spot-on answers.

• TreeSync—the ability to link and synchronize your desktop tree with an online tree at Ancestry.
• The new blended families display option.
• The new descendancy report.

You can even get questions answered by the developers who work on the software. Information will apply to both PC and Mac users.

It’s not too late—you can still register for the webinar by clicking here.

And if you have questions you’d like answered, please enter them in the Comments section below. We’ll try to respond to them during the webinar or on the blog. (Please limit your questions to functionality available in Family Tree Maker 2012.) We appreciate your questions and look forward to talking to you soon. Thanks!

Have you missed past webinars? You can view them any time at FamilyTreeMaker.com.

Since it wasn’t possible to answer every question last night, we thought we’d grab a few of the most frequently asked questions and post them here.

Kay asked, “How do we find Irish ancestors that lived in Canada?”
Ancestry.com has some terrific Canadian collections to help you find your Irish-Canadian ancestors. With a World Deluxe membership (or a Canadian membership to Ancestry.ca), you can access Canadian censuses and many other records. You can browse a list of some of our more popular Canadian collections on the Canada place page here. If you’re searching through the search form on the homepage at Ancestry.com, you can check the collection priority box at the bottom of the search box to give Canadian records higher priority and check the box below it to return only Canadian records.

Gary wanted to know, “What’s the difference between a parish, a barony, and a county?”
Once you discover your ancestor’s place of origin in Ireland, it’s important to larn about the names of the various land divisions into which that place fell. The Public Records Office of Northern Ireland has an excellent description of these and other land divisions in Ireland here.

Carolyn asked about a problem many of us will run into with our Irish ancestors, “When I estimate birth years based on ages in census records, I end up with different birth dates from census to census, even though I know I have the right person, living with the same people?”
As Eileen mentioned in her portion of the class, our Irish ancestors were often inconsistent when it came to giving their ages, so you will find some wide ranging answers when it comes to birthdates. Gather than range of dates for the person you’re searching for and pick a year in the center of that range. Using the advanced search form on Ancestry.com, you can specify +/- 1, 2, 5 or even 10 years using the and give yourself a little wiggle room in your searches for other records. Try to locate as many records as you can on the person and you’ll often be able to narrow it down. Also keep in mind that the ages got fuzzier as our ancestors got older. Records created when they were young are more likely to be accurate. It’s harder for a 5 year old to pass for a 14 year old, but may have been easier to believe that a 64 year old was only 55.

Doris inquired about a place in Ireland, “Tullamore – is it in County Kerry or Offaly? I’ve been given both.”
Actually Doris, according to the place names database on the Irish Times website, there are four places named Tullamore—in Counties Clare, Kerry, Offaly, and Tipperary. Try searching Griffith’s Valuation on Ancestry.com and see if the surname you’re researching is more predominant in one of the locations. If you’re working with a not-so-common surname, this could help you zero in on the correct Tullamore. Keep looking for records on this side of the pond as well. You may run across another record of your ancestor, this time with the county listed.

Nanette asked, “Did all the Irish who came to this country go through the naturalization process, and did they have to have passports in order to enter the United States?”
Many of our ancestors were never formally naturalized. That said, immigrants living in urban areas like New York City or Chicago may have been more likely to have been naturalized because political “machines” were keenly aware of large numbers of immigrants arriving in the mid-nineteenth century. In efforts to win the votes of these new residents, politicians were often swift in assisting immigrants in obtaining naturalization so that they could return the favor in the form of a vote cast in their direction—in some cases disregarding the five-year residency requirement.

For the most part, passports were not required of U.S. citizens for foreign travel until World War I, although they were mandatory for a short time during the Civil War (Aug. 19, 1861–Mar. 17, 1862). Immigrants who traveled often requested passports once they were naturalized to avoid hassles when returning to the U.S.

Ancestry.com has millions of naturalization indexes and well over a million actual records online, which can be searched here. There is also a collection of U.S. Passport Applications, 1795-1925 available.

• Design and print charts
• Run  reports
• Utilize the print functions available on each workspace
• Create individual and family slide shows

If you haven’t already registered, it’s not too late. Sign up now!

If you have questions you’d like answered, please enter them in the Comments section below. We’ll try to respond to them during the webinar or on the blog. (Please limit your questions to functionality available in Family Tree Maker 2011.) We appreciate your questions and look forward to talking to you soon. Thanks!

Have you missed past webinars? You can view them any time at FamilyTreeMaker.com.

• Use Smart Stories—a new narrative tool to help you create and share family stories.
• Create new fan charts.
• Dress up your charts using photographs and embellishments.
• Add your own historical events to timelines.
• And much more.

Click here to register.

“My great-grandfather, Hans Knutson, came from Norway and, according to family history, had a bit of a lisp. When he told the officials his name, they understood him to say Newton, rather than Knutson. That was the name that was written down. He liked it, according to a relative, so he decided to keep it, although it was never changed legally.

Most of my great-grandfather’s sisters kept the Knutson name; only one used the name ‘Newton’ like Hans. I, however, didn’t know this for many years, which made tracing this family a bit difficult.

One day, my mom made the remark that Hans had some relatives named Moe. She wasn’t sure how they were related but just had some recollection of that fact. So I did a little research and found the Moe family. It felt like a small and somewhat odd lead but I was willing to go anywhere it took me.

I found a Kari Moe who came from Norway at about the same time Hans had so I contacted someone from her family. The man that I spoke to was adamant that his grandmother, Kari, was not related. Her maiden name was Knutson, not Newton and he knew the Newton clan, as they were all neighbors, and they were just not related. ‘Surely someone would have mentioned it before now,’ was his response.

Several months later, this same man called me. His aunt had just passed away and it was his responsibility to clean out her house. In her Bible, he found some obituaries: one was the obituary of his grandmother. It listed each of his grandmother’s sisters and her brother, Hans Newton. He called me in excitement and to apologize. He also wanted to let me know that on the wall was a picture of Hans Newton with each of his sisters, and he was happy to make a copy for me.

I now have a picture of my great-grandfather and the history of the Moe family, which I would have never had if I hadn’t followed that one lead through Ancestry.com.”

Thanks Kathy. And if anyone else has a story to share, send it to stories@ancestry.com.

By the way, if you want to learn tricks, tips and how-tos for success with immigration records, do what I did: take all the hands-on advice you can get from Ancestry Weekly Discovery editor, Juliana Szucs Smith. Attend her FREE online class, Coming to America: Finding Your Immigrant Ancestors, tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern. You can register for the live class or watch it at a later date in our archive (live classes hit the archive about a day after broadcast) at http://learn.ancestry.com/LearnMore/Webinars.aspx.

You’ll learn how to:

• Use Smart Stories—a new narrative tool to help you create and share family stories.
• Create new fan charts.
• Dress up your charts using photographs and embellishments.
• Add your own historical events to timelines.
• And much more.

To attend the Family Tree Maker 2011 webinar, click here to register.

And if you have questions you’d like answered, please enter them in the Comments section below. We’ll try to respond to them during the webinar or on the blog. (Please limit your questions to functionality available in Family Tree Maker 2011.) We appreciate your questions and look forward to talking to you soon. Thanks!

Have you missed past webinars? You can view them any time at FamilyTreeMaker.com.