You can share daily finds from the record page by clicking on the “Share this record” link in the Page Tools section.  Then select Facebook, Twitter or Email from the drop-down menu, login if needed, enter a personalized message and submit. 

Share options on the record page

 Here is a Facebook post that I made for a WW1 draft record of my grandpa which shows his age, occupation, gives a physical description and even has his signature.   

Facebook post with a comment

Your family and friends will be able to click on the link they receive to view the record on Ancestry.com.

Shared record as seen in the image viewer on Ancestry.com

Give it a try and please let me know what you think.  We look forward to your feedback to help us know how to best extend sharing to other areas of the Ancestry site and to other types of media such as photos and stories.

The goal of Member Connect in family trees is to help you discover who else is researching your relatives so that you can collaborate in your family history research.  You may make new discoveries, may help someone else make new discoveries or correct incorrect information in their tree, and may even connect with a cousin you didn’t know you had.

There are three main steps for Member Connect within your family tree:

1. Evaluating and connecting with suggested connections
2. Learning from and collaborating with connections you make
3. Staying up to date on new discoveries your connections make

 Evaluating and connecting with suggested connections

 On the profile page for an ancestor in your tree you’ll find a new tab called Member Connect.  This tab has three different areas: Recent Activity, Connections, and Suggested Connections.

“Suggested Connections” is the page where we list potential matches for your ancestor or relative in other public member trees.  Here you can evaluate the information they have about your relative, including a list of the records from Ancestry.com that they’ve listed as sources.  You can also link to the other member’s tree to learn more.  If it looks like a good match for your relative and you’d like to be informed when new information is added to this person, just click on “Connect”.  If you’re not interested, just click “Ignore”.

 Tip: On the Suggested Connections page we’ll mark which information from the other member is different than your information (labeled as Conflicting) and which information you don’t have at all in your tree (labeled as New).  You’ll want to look at this information closely as you evaluate a possible connection.

Learning from and collaborating with connections you make

After you have connected with another member researching a common ancestor, the connection will be listed under the “Connections” section of the Member Connect tab.  If you have already accepted Ancestry Hints or saved information from another member tree, you will already have connections from these trees listed in your Connections list.  If you find that you don’t want to be connected, you can just click “Remove” on the connection.

Tip: It is important to note the difference between connecting with another member and saving or merging information from their tree, as you might from Ancestry Hints.  Connecting with another member does not change any information in your tree.  It simply allows you to evaluate their research in case there is something you can learn from each other, as well as stay up to date on future discoveries they might make.

Why connect with another member?

There are several benefits of connecting with another member researching a common ancestor.

• You can quickly check what they have in their public member tree without leaving your tree by going to the Connections section of the Member Connect tab on your ancestor’s profile page.
• We’ll identify differences between your trees so that you can update your tree if you learn something new.  You can also contact the other member directly if you have information that would help them update something in their tree.
• You can also stay up to date on their new research discoveries through the Recent Activity page.

There are a few important links available for a connection for someone in your tree.

1. At the top of the connection listing there will be a direct link to view the individual in the other member’s tree
2. You will also see the username of the other member.  This is a link that lets you see a preview of their public member profile.  You can then choose to view their full profile or contact them directly through our online Messages feature. 
3. When comparing your trees any details, records, or photos that you don’t have in your tree will be marked as “New”.  Clicking this button will allow you to save this information to your tree, view it in the other member’s tree, or ignore it.
4. If the other member has information that is different that what you have in your tree it will be marked as “Conflicting”.  Clicking this button will give you the same options as for New information.

If you choose to save information, you can customize what you save to your tree as you do today when you accept an Ancestry Hint.  This includes editing the information as well as choosing whether or not you also want to include records from Ancestry that the other member has used as a source.

When you find conflicting information in another member’s this is an opportunity to dig in and do a little research to verify the information you have in your tree.  You may find that your information was correct and you can contact the member you’ve connected with to share what you know.  You may also find that the other member was correct and decide to update your family tree.

When saving conflicting information you have two different options.  First, you can simply update the information you already have in your tree.  Please note that we will not change the information in your tree without you choosing exactly what you want to update.

Second, you can add the information from the other member as alternate or new information in your tree without changing what you already have.  Just click the box to add it as an alternate or new fact or event.

Staying up to date on new discoveries your connections make

After you connect with another member you can stay up to date on the new discoveries they make about your common relative in the Recent Activity section of Member Connect in your family tree.  This page will list all of the public research being done on Ancestry.com that relates to your relative.  This might be a new historical record that is found, a new photo that is uploaded, or a corrected birth date based on a new source the other member discovered.

If you have publicly shared photos or other information, on the Recent Activity page we’ll also let you know if other members are finding it useful and saving it.  And if you have invited others to your tree as editors, we’ll list any changes they make in your tree as well.

If you aren’t interested in all of the Activity Types, just un-check the appropriate boxes in the upper right of the page.

In addition to the Recent Activity list for a specific relative in your family tree, there is a Recent Member Connect Activity list available from your homepage, the main Collaborate tab on the site, and the “Recent Member Connect Activity” link in the drop down when pointing your mouse at the Collaborate tab. 

This page will show all activity on the site related to any of your research on Ancestry.com.  This includes all of your connections in each of your trees, as well as all historical records you have saved, corrected, or commented on.  Just like the Recent Activity list in your tree, this page lets you filter out specific types of activities that you’re not interested in seeing.  Since there is a lot more activity on this page, we’re also working on additional filtering options.

For members with large trees and a lot of activity on the site this may be a pretty full list.  If this is the case for you, you’ll probably have the easiest time looking at the Recent Activity list for a specific relative in your tree that you’re interested in.  That lets you filter the list down to just what applies to that ancestor rather than seeing the whole full list of activity. 

I hope these extra details about Member Connect in your family tree are helpful.  If you are interested in learning even more we’ll be conducting a one-hour online presentation about Member Connect on August 17th. We’ll show you where to find the new features and how to use them to discover even more about your family story. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session.  Click here to learn more and register.

We also want to make sure that we continue to improve the Member Connect feature.  As you begin using Member Connect, please send us your feedback by emailing us at memberconnectfeedback@ancestry.com.  Your feedback will help us continue to improve this new feature and make it even more useful for you.

We are very excited about Member Connect and hope that it will help you make new valuable connections and discoveries in your family history research.

Millions of people research their family history on Ancestry.com and odds are that some of them are researching the same people as you. Member Connect is designed to help you learn about those members, share your discoveries together, and stay up to date on the research they are doing on your shared ancestors.

You’ll find elements of Member Connect throughout Ancestry.com, including within your family tree, while viewing census images and other historical records, and in a list of recent research activity about your ancestors on your homepage.

Where you’ll notice Member Connect

1. Viewing Historical Records

   

   When you find a historical record for one of your ancestors, you’ll also be able to see who else has saved the record or made comments or corrections to it. This is part of our new enhanced image page, which is launching today on a few of our census collections and expanding to other collections in the future.  See an example of a record on the new image page.

2. Your Family Tree

   

   If you have a family tree on Ancestry.com, we’ll show you who else potentially has your ancestor in their public member tree. You can choose who you connect with, and when you connect you can compare the information in their tree with yours, contact the other member, update your tree with new discoveries, and be notified about new information they find about your shared ancestor.

3. “Recent Activity” Lists

   

   On profile pages in your tree you’ll have a Recent Activity list showing all of the public research being done on Ancestry.com that relates to your specific ancestor. On your homepage, the Collaborate tab, and the Recent Member Connect Activity page you’ll find a full list of all of the site activity related to your ancestors, including activity around records you have saved, corrected, or commented on as well as activity from connections made in your family tree.   We’re working on additional options to filter this list, but in the meantime if you find that your list is too full we suggest just checking the Recent Activity list on the profile pages for specific ancestors in your tree that you’re interested in.

We respect your privacy

Your privacy is very important to us. You can review or modify your member activity privacy settings at any time. These settings determine what you share in the recent activity lists and the Member Connect section on the new enhanced image page.

Please note: In most cases Member Connect does not share more information about your research than what is already publicly available on Ancestry.com. The main exception is when historical records, photos, and stories are saved to your private member tree. Depending upon your privacy settings we may let other members know general information about this activity, but they will be unable to view the actual tree or information in that tree without being invited by the tree owner.

We want to continue to make Member Connect better

As you begin using Member Connect, please send us your feedback by emailing us at memberconnectfeedback@ancestry.com. Your feedback will help us continue to improve this new feature and make it even more useful for you.

Interested in learning more?

We’ve created a page describing Member Connect that includes three short video tutorials. Just click here to visit the page.

I also hope to make additional blog posts later in the week with a bit more details about the different elements of Member Connect.

Finally, we’ll be conducting a one-hour online presentation about Member Connect on August 17th. We’ll show you where to find the new features and how to use them to discover even more about your family story. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. Click here to learn more and register.

We are very excited about Member Connect and hope that it will help you make new valuable connections and discoveries in your family history research.

• One member whose grandmother was adopted and had never known her mother was contacted by a descendant of his grandmother’s brother and his family received the first photo of his great-grandmother they’d ever seen.
• Another member was sent a box of civil war records about his wife’s great-great-great-grandfather from a member who picked them up at a yard sale and recognized that they related to his family.

I think we can all learn more about our own family history by connecting and collaborating with others who are also researching our ancestors. 

There are millions of people researching their family histories on Ancestry.com and some of them are likely researching the same people you are.  We are working on a new feature called Member Connect that we will be releasing later this summer to help make it easier to find, connect with, and collaborate with these other members.

Member Connect allows you to: 

1. Connect with other members through historical records about your ancestors.  When you find an historical record for one of your ancestors, you’ll also be able to see who else has saved the record or made comments or corrections.
2. Build a network in your Ancestry Member Tree of other members researching your ancestors.  We’ll suggest connections based on matches for your ancestor in other public member trees, but you decide which members you want to connect with.  If you connect you can compare their tree with yours, share research, and stay up to date on the new research they do in the future.
3. Get notified about any new research activity about your ancestors on the site.  You’ll get a list of the specific research activity on the site that applies to your ancestors.  This could be a notification that someone has added a comment or correction to a record about your great-grandfather that you’ve saved.  Or it could be a new photo that a member you’ve connected with added to your common ancestor in their public member tree.

We are excited about Member Connect and hope that it will help you make new valuable connections and discoveries in your family history research.  If you’d like to learn more, click here.

Here’s a snapshot of what your new homepage will look like when Member Connect launches:

And date relevance seems to be the most requested change. If you tell us grandpa died in 1910, you really don’t want to see a 1930 census record.

Making places more relevant and names more relevant are also important, but dates seem to be the one thing we’ve heard the most about. And not to worry, we will get to places and names as well.

Here are the changes we’ve made:

• If you are searching for someone and you just know a birth year, we will assume the person lived about 100 years. And we will only return records from the birth year – 5, and birthdates + 102.
• If you are searching for someone and you just know a death date, we will again assume the person lived about 100 years, and we will only return records from the death year – 105 to death year+2.
• If you put in both a birth year and a death year, we will return records between birth year – 5 to death year + 2.

Why did we choose a 5 year “fudge factor” for birth year and a 2 year “fudge factor” for death year? We’ve spent a lot of time with census records, and vital records, and when those dates are wrong, they usually fall into that range.

I’m going to try and guess at some of your questions. If you have other questions about the changes we made to make dates more relevant, please post them in the comments.

Questions

• So what if I use a range on the birth or death year? If you have a birth year of 1850, and choose a range of +-2, and a death year of 1904 +- 10, then we will look for records between (1850-2-5) and (1904+10+2) or 1843 and 1916.
• Why do we use a fudge factor? Because our ancestors were absolutely horrible with dates and getting them right. Our tests show that a “fudge factor” of five for birth year and two for death year gets better results.
• What if I don’t want the fudge factor added in? Then add five to the birth year, or subtract two from the death year and you’ve outsmarted the system. I wouldn’t recommend it; you may be outsmarting yourself.
• Should I mark dates exact? Depends. Death date is usually a very bad date to mark exact, because so few records have a death date. So enter the death date as limiting factor, but don’t mark it exact unless you are specifically looking for records that have that exact date in them. Birth year shows up in lots of records, so that is a better choice for exact, though that does require that a record have a birth year or an age. And remember, you can mark exact and a range, and that will match anything exactly in the range. I recommend this strongly for birth year.
• What if I see a record that looks like it should be date filtered out of my results set, i.e., I put in death date of 1903, and it’s from 1920? It probably means we haven’t reindexed that data set yet — we’ve covered about 95% of all eligible records for launch. Feel free to leave the name of the data set in a comment on this blog post and we’ll make sure it gets on
  the list. We are working our way through all of our data sets, but we started with some of the biggest and most commonly surfaced in our search results.

• What if I don’t want you to date filter for me? If you don’t use dates at all, we can’t and won’t lifespan filter. Or you can type in a broader range of dates to include more records. But this one is a no brainer, as many of you have pointed out — lifespan filtering is going to give you better results. Now when we launch place filtering (hmm….wonder if that is a hint of things to come soon…) we will make that something you choose or not choose, because you will need more control over that.

This is a new addition to our algorithm, so if you have questions, this is the place. I’ll be keeping an eye on this blog post.

This will benefit both old and new search, but we really think you’ll see the difference most in the new search interface. There are many more improvements to come, and in the meantime, I’d encourage you to take a fresh look at new search and see how much this has improved the results you see.

One other thing – we’ve also heard from a number of people that you like to use new search for some types of search, and old search for others – but that switching between them is a pain. To make this easier, we’ve just retired the “introduction page” and introduced a simple link in the yellow bar at the top of the page to enable you to switch easily between the two searches. This will be available tomorrow (Wednesday) as well.

Happy Searching!

The improvement I am most excited about is the addition of “Ancestor Links” in messages.  Some of the member trees on Ancestry.com are private and to learn more about one of your ancestors that may be in the tree you need to contact the owner of the tree.  If you choose to do this, we will add a link in your message that goes to the ancestor you were interested in viewing.  This is what it looks like in the contact form:

(If you decide you don’t want to include the link for whatever reason just click on the ‘X’ next to the link.)

When the owner of the tree receives your message they will have the link to the person in their tree so that they can easily look at the ancestor you are asking about.  We’ll also include a link in the message that lets them easily invite you to their tree, if they decide to do that.  This is what it looks like to the person receiving the message:

In addition to adding the Ancestor Links, we’ve also made the following improvements:

• We have increased the character limit for messages from 2,000 to 5,000 for those interested in sending longer messages
• We have corrected an error that sometimes prevented some users with a smaller monitor resolution from scrolling down on the contact form to click the Send button
• We have added some extra text in a few places within the Messages feature to better explain how some things work
• We’ve also made a few other minor fixes based on feedback

We hope you continue to enjoy the Messages feature and that you are able to connect with many other members who are doing similar research.

First, if you haven’t ever connected with other Ancestry members I hope you find the opportunity to do so. Ancestry.com has the world’s largest online community dedicated to family history and members help each other make new discoveries every day. The further you follow your family story back in time, the more likely you are to find other members who have ancestors in common with you. You can learn from and share with these members, and you may even find a relative you didn’t know you had.

Previously the tool available to contact other members was the email-based Ancestry Connection Service, but there were some challenges with this tool. First, it was hard to see who you were communicating with because there was no connection to their public profile on the site or other information about them. Second, the messages would come mixed in with your other emails which made it easy to miss them and hard to organize them. They may have even ended up in a junk folder without you ever seeing them.

The new online Messages feature overcomes these problems and is hopefully a more enriching way to connect with other members. When you send or receive a message from another member you now just do it on the Ancestry.com website.

When you find another member that you are interested in contacting there will be a Contact link available on their public profile that lets you send them a message right away. All members registered with Ancestry.com can view and reply to messages received from others, whether they have a paid membership or not. Paid members can also click on the Contact link for other members they find throughout the site and initiate contact with them.

You can get easy access to messages you’ve received from others just by clicking the “Messages” link at the top of any page. And if there are messages waiting for you that you haven’t read yet, we’ll include a number at the end of the link indicating how many new messages you have. (You’ll also get an email notification about new messages from other members to make sure that you don’t miss them.)

When reading a message you can see information from the public profile of the person who contacted you, in addition to reading the message they sent. This makes it a lot easier to learn more about them and see what areas of family history research you might have in common. When you’re replying back and forth with another member we’ll also keep all messages in the thread together so that you can more easily follow the conversation.

Since your past messages are all together on the Ancestry.com site it helps make sure that you don’t lose track of any of them. You can even create personalized folders to organize your messages however you’d like to.

I hope that by using the new Messages feature you’ll be able to more easily connect and work with other Ancestry members.

We have an RSS feed for our message boards that we have recently improved.  In the past it was difficult to see updated replies to message board posts through the RSS feed.  We now send an update for each new message, whether it is a new original post or a reply.  We’ve found that this has helped us stay up-to-date on the message boards we watch.

If you are interested in subscribing to the RSS feed for one of your favorite message boards, just click on the “Subscribe to RSS” link on the top of the message board.

For those who weren’t aware, you can also add a box to your homepage to show you updates to your favorite message boards.  Just click the “Customize your homepage” link at the top right of the homepage to add this to your page.

We hope that this update has made it a better experience for those of you who use the RSS feature on the message boards.

The “New Site Features Added to Ancestry.com in 2008″ webinar will take place next Tuesday (1/27) at 8pm EST.  We will have a panel of Ancestry.com product managers discussing key improvements we made last year to areas such as family trees, search, homepage, profile pages, and more.  We will also leave ample time for your questions.

If you are interested, please register here.

We hope to see you there!

Eric Shoup

New Search interface

Thanks to your feedback we identified a bug that is making it so that if you click on one of the content Quick Links on the homepage like “Birth, Marriage & Death Records” or “U.S. Census Records” you will get switched to our new Search experience if you weren’t already using it. This was not our intention. We hope to be able to fix those links within the next week or so to prevent this from happening.

If you like the new Search experience, you don’t need to do anything. If you have gotten switched to the new Search experience and prefer the old Search experience, just click on the Search tab and then click on the link near the top of the page called “Switch back to old search experience.” We’re sorry for any inconvenience this caused any of you.

Some additional links to commonly used content

Since everyone has different content that they’re interested in, we won’t be able to automatically put all of the links you want into the new Quick Links section. Based on feedback, though, there are a couple links that we think will help most members. First, we’ll be adding a link in the Quick Links section to go to the Ancestry Card Catalog where you can quickly find and search any database you are interested in. Second, we’ll be adding a link to the US Military Collection, as that is the most-used record collection that is not already listed in the Quick Links section.

We expect to add these new links in the next week or so. They will be added for everyone, so if you don’t want them in your Quick Links you can easily remove them by putting your mouse over the link and then clicking the trash can icon.

Making it easier to add the links you really care about

We know that for many of you the links that are initially included in the Quick Links do not cover everything that you want quick access to. Right now you can add a link to any page you want by clicking on the “Add a link” button and then pasting in the URL, but we recognize that is a bit of work. To make this easier we are going to be adding a link in the masthead at the top of each page that will let you add any page you are on to the Quick Links section of your homepage. So you will just need to go to one of your favorite pages once, and then you can add it to your Quick Links with one click. We hope to be able to add this feature within the next 2 weeks or so.

Quicker access to the Search box

While a large number of our members have online trees on Ancestry.com (over 5 million currently) and want quick access to their trees, some members who do not have an online tree on Ancestry.com have expressed the concern that the Trees box at the top of the homepage is making it harder to get to get to the Search box below it. We are working on a design that would allow these members to switch to a smaller version of the Tree box that takes less space. This should move the Search box up on the page and make it easier to access. We hope to be able to add this within the next 2 weeks or so.

Thanks for your patience as we work to make these improvements for you. We’re very glad that some of you are finding value in the new page already. We really hope that the updated homepage can help you take advantage of the Ancestry.com site and further your family history research.