Since the signing of an agreement in May 2008, we have worked with NARA to digitize historical records collections on-location at NARA’s archive in Maryland. This is the first time NARA has partnered with a commercial entity to have documents scanned off-site. The new scanning facility will allow us to digitize more than five times the records than it could at the NARA archive, with the capacity to scan at least 5 million documents, many still in paper form, each year.

To celebrate this growing relationship with NARA, we have launched two collections that were a part of the May 2008 partnership announcement:

Honolulu Passenger List, 1900-1953
Honolulu Passenger Lists, 1900-1953, consists of more than 1.4 million records of passenger arrivals to Honolulu, Hawaii.  Included in this collection are some familiar names who visited the island of Oahu from 1900 to 1953:

• Rita Hayworth – For the filming of Miss Sadie Thompson, Rita traveled to Hawaii aboard the ship Lurline and arrived in Honolulu on May 23, 1953.
• Shirley Temple – In 1935, at the age of six, Shirley Temple traveled to Hawaii with her parents, Gertrude and George, for the filming of Curly Top. She returned to Hawaii in 1937 and 1939.
• Cary Grant (Archibald Leach) – Traveling with Mary Astor (Lucille) and her husband, Manuel Del Campo, aboard the Mastonia, in 1938.
• John Wayne – Arrived in Honolulu with wife, Esperanza, aboard the ship Lurline on March 19, 1952 for the filming of Big Jim McLain.

Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1963-1974
We also launched Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1963-1974. This first installment of more than 80,000 records consists of letters, formal reports, passports and other key historical documents that verify deaths of Americans overseas. Included in this valuable collection are some familiar names:

• Judy Garland – Listed as “Judy Garland DeVinko”, Garland died of “barbiturate poisoning, incautious overdose, accidental” in her Chelsea, London, house in 1969.
• Sylvia Plath – The death record states that American author “Sylvia Plath-Hughes” died of “Carbon Monoxide Poisoning (domestic gas) whilst suffering from depression. Did kill herself” in February 1963 in London. She is buried in Yorkshire, England.
• Mama Cass – Listed as “Ellen Naomi Cohen”, Mama Cass, from The Mamas and the Papas, died of “fatty myocardial degeneration due to obesity,” contrary to rumors she choked on a ham sandwich, while in London in 1974.
• Jimi Hendrix – In 1970, controversy surrounded Jimi Hendrix’s London death, as there was no solid confirmation of his cause of death. This record collection continues to add to the mystery: James Marshall Hendrix’s death record was replaced with a note showing that J. White checked out the death record in 1979. Today, the check-out slip is the only document in Jimi Hendrix’s file.

]]> http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2009/10/06/ancestry-com-announces-new-washington-dc-scanning-facility/feed/ 22 http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2009/08/27/ancestry-com-bringing-high-speed-scanners-to-fgs-2009/ http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2009/08/27/ancestry-com-bringing-high-speed-scanners-to-fgs-2009/#comments Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:16:08 +0000 Anastasia Tyler http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/?p=2007 Ancestry.com is excited to provide attendees of the Federation of Genealogical Societies’ family history conference (September 2-5 in Little Rock, Arkansas) the opportunity to have their family records scanned, for free, on high–speed scanners.

We are bringing two scanners to the conference, and attendees can sign up for up to 15-min sessions to have their family history documents and photographs scanned and saved to a flash drive (provided by Ancestry.com).

Will you be at the FGS conference and bring items to scan? If so, let us know by pre-registering for the scanners using the following link:  http://FGSscanners.eventbrite.com

Details about Scanning

• Ancestry.com imaging specialists will operate the scanners
• Ancestry.com is bringing two scanners to the conference: a high–speed, loose–leaf scanner that will scan documents and photographs in full color and a planetary scanner for books and more fragile items
• Attendees will be able to scan about 100 family photographs or documents during a 15–minute session
• Scanned images will be saved to flash drives (provided at no cost by Ancestry.com) and given to attendees. (Note: Scanned images will NOT be uploaded to the Ancestry.com website by Ancestry.com personnel.)
• Due to anticipated demand, conference attendees will be able to sign up for only one scanning session during the conference

• Nearly half of all Americans were named after a family member.
• Of those, approximately one-third were named after their father, around 17 percent were named after their grandfather, and an estimated 15 percent were named for their grandmother.
• More men than women were named after a family member.
• In fact, 20 percent of men were given both their first and middle names after a family member.

We also looked to the family trees of some of America’s hottest celebrities to see the baby-naming patterns they had adopted.

Last Names as First Names

• Reese Witherspoon, born Laura Jean Reese Witherspoon, was given the name Reese after the last name of her mother’s ancestors. Her grandfather, Emmett Reese, and his parents BJ and Elizabeth Reese, are found in the 1920 Census.

 I am Henry the Eighth I Am

• Tom Cruise, or Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, comes from a long line of Thomases as witnessed in the 1930 Census, which shows his great-grandfather Thomas C. Mapother Sr. working as a lawyer in a circuit court.

 Mixing it Up: A French Spin on a Family Name

• Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt looked to their family trees for inspiration when naming the twins Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline. Marcheline is actually the French-sounding name of Angelina’s late mother.

For more interesting baby-naming stats and celebrity factoids, check out our news release.

2009 Salt Lake Family History Expo
August 28–29, 2009, 8 am–6 pm
South Towne Exposition Center, Sandy, Utah

 Expo Classes – Expo registration required to attend
You can register online to attend both days of Expo classes, which include more than 100 family history classes taught by 50 of the nation’s top family history experts and speakers.

Ancestry.com experts will teach 11 classes at the Expo, including classes on searching Ancestry.com, using DNA, building online family trees, creating family history books and much, much more!

Register today to attend the Expo, $78 for both days, $48 for a single day, or $12 per class. (Registration also available at the door).

Exhibit Hall – Free to the Public
Ancestry.com experts will be on hand to answer questions about the website, and don’t miss special conference discounts on various Ancestry.com products.

The Exhibit Hall also features family history vendors from across the country. The Exhibit Hall is free to the public and is open:

• Friday, August 28: 9 am – 6 pm
• Saturday, August 29: 9 am – 5:30 pm

We hope to see you this weekend at the Salt Lake Expo!

 2009 Salt Lake Family History Expo
August 28-29, 2009, 8 am-6 pm
South Towne Exposition Center, Sandy, Utah

 Expo Classes – Expo registration required to attend
Register today to attend both days of Expo classes, which include more than 100 family history classes taught by 50 of the nation’s top family history experts and speakers.

 Ancestry.com experts will teach the following Expo classes:

• What’s New on Ancestry.com
• Tapping into the Ancestry.com and RootsWeb Community
• DNA for the Clueless: An Easy-to-Understand Introduction to Genetic Genealogy
• Simplifying Online Research with Ancestry.com Family Trees
• Immigration and Emigration Records on Ancestry.com
• Getting the Most out of Family Tree Maker
• Getting Started in Online Family History
• Finding Your British Ancestors – Online
• Best Strategies for Searching Ancestry.com
• Make Em’ Want to Read It: Writing Family Histories that People Want to Read
• Online Tools for Creating and Publishing Family History Books

Register today to attend the Expo and take advantage of the special pre-registration discount (pre-registration deadline is August 24).

 Exhibit Hall – Free to the Public
Visit the Ancestry.com booth in the Expo’s exhibit hall where Ancestry.com experts will be on hand to answer questions about the website, and don’t miss special conference discounts on various Ancestry.com products.

The Exhibit Hall also features family history vendors from across the country. The Exhibit Hall is free to the public and is open:

• Friday, August 28: 9 am – 6 pm
• Saturday, August 29: 9 am – 5:30 pm

 Expo Banquet, sponsored by Ancestry.com – Banquet ticket required to attend
Plan to attend the Expo’s banquet, sponsored by Ancestry.com, on Friday, August 28 at 6:30 pm. Popular speaker Crista Cowan, with a charismatic speaking style guaranteed to entertain and inspire, will be the banquet’s featured speaker.

Ten lucky banquets attendees will receive an Ancestry.com prize package worth more than $400, including a 1-year World Deluxe subscription to Ancestry.com as well as several family history must-haves. In addition, all banquet attendees will receive a complimentary copy of the brand-new Family Tree Maker 2010. It’s an evening you don’t want to miss! Purchase your banquet ticket here.

Register today to attend the Salt Lake Family History Expo.

We hope to see you in Salt Lake!

These St. Croix African Roots Project records will help tens of thousands of people trace their ancestral roots, some to individual Africans and specific African homelands.

The first installment of this collection that went online today includes the U.S. Virgin Islands St. Croix Slave Lists (1772-1821) and Population Census (1835-1911), which together contain information on more than 700,000 slaves, owners and family members.

These records will be searchable for free on Ancestry.com until the end of July.

A Powerful Family Discovery:
For Susan Samuel of Houston, TX, the documents uncover the story of her great-great-great-great-grandmother Venus Johannes. Records soon to be online show that, while still young, Venus Johannes was captured from the side of a river in Senegal, Africa and enslaved at Goree Island – a stop for captured slaves as they were loaded onto ships bound for Britain and the U.S. Other records show that from Goree Island, she was married off to an American Sea Captain and brought to St. Croix, where she was illegally re-enslaved. Enslaved for some 30 years, she was finally freed in 1815.

Ancestry.com has set up a remote scanning operation in St. Croix to digitize more of this collection and in the coming year, the site will add more than a million family history records from the project including:

• Slave Trade Shipping Records 1749-1802 – Names and prices of enslaved Africans sold from slave ships to purchasers on St. Croix
• Property Inventories 1755-1848 - Names, occupations, property values, locations and family relations of enslaved individuals
• Free Persons of Color Records 1740-1834 – Periodic censuses, lists and freedom charters for the free colored population and other special censuses and papers
• Church Records 1744-1917 – Records of baptisms, marriages, births and deaths of slaves and free persons belonging to the Lutheran, Dutch Reform, Anglican, Roman Catholic and Moravian churches in St. Croix
• Vital Statistics 1820-1917 – Records of births, death, and marriages on an annual basis with information about family relations
• Vaccination Records 1823-1853 – Smallpox vaccination records for all plantation slaves for the years 1823-1824 and annual vaccinations performed in both towns and plantations 1829-1853
• Emancipation Records 1848 – Compiled for all plantation slaves freed in order to establish compensation amounts for the owners
• Movements of Plantation Workers 1848-1870 – Traces the movements of ex-slaves around St. Croix and off-island in the years after emancipation
• Immigration Records 1850-1917 – Documents immigration of people from other Caribbean Islands to St. Croix after emancipation
• Laborer Lists 1849-1917 – Lists of laborers working on the plantations

Search the two new St. Croix databases at http://www.ancestry.com/virginislands.

2009 Federation of Genealogical Societies’ Genealogy Conference
September 2–5, 2009
Little Rock Statehouse Convention Center, Little Rock, Arkansas  

 Free Track of Ancestry.com Classes – Free to the Public
As part of the conference, Ancestry.com is excited to offer a FREE track of five classes designed to help you get the most out of your Ancestry.com membership. The free classes will be held on Saturday, September 5, from 8 am to 4:30 pm.

Class Schedule:

• 8 am – Getting the Most out of Your Ancestry.com Subscription – Discover how the historical records, tree–building tools, and search tools on Ancestry.com can grow your tree. (Designed for beginning users of Ancestry.com)
• 9:30 am – Best Strategies for Searching Ancestry.com – Learn the best strategies for searching Ancestry.com’s thousands of databases to get the most information about your ancestors. (Designed for beginning to intermediate users)
• 11 am – What’s New on Ancestry.com – Find out about the most recent content, website features, product enhancements, and much more. (Designed for beginning to advanced users)
• 2 pm – Tapping into the Ancestry.com and RootsWeb Community – Discover the tools on Ancestry.com and RootsWeb that can help you find and communicate with other family historians. (Designed for beginning to advanced users)
• 3:30 pm – Getting the Most from Family Tree Maker – Learn how Family Tree Maker can help you more effectively organize, manage, and share your family history. (Designed for beginning to intermediate users of Family Tree Maker)

We’d love to know if you’re coming, so we can make appropriate preparations. Let us know if you’ll be able to attend by RSVPing at this URL: http://AncestryDayLittleRock.eventbrite.com

Conference Classes – Conference registration required to attend
Register today to attend the four full days of the conference, which includes more than 150 family history classes taught by more than 50 nationally known family history experts and professionals.

In addition, Tim Sullivan, CEO of Ancestry.com, will be the conference’s keynote speaker. Titled “The Future of Our Past: Preserving Yesterday’s Records for Tomorrow’s Researchers,” Tim’s talk will discuss how technology has and is drastically changing the way we pursue our family history.

Register for the conference today.

Exhibit Hall – Free to the Public
Bring this email to the Ancestry.com booth in the conference’s exhibit hall and receive a special thank–you gift. Ancestry.com experts will be on hand to answer questions about the website. Sit in on demonstrations covering Ancestry.com, Family Tree Maker, MyCanvas and more. And don’t miss special conference discounts on various Ancestry.com products.

Ask the Expert — Juliana Smith, popular editor of the Ancestry Weekly Discovery newsletter (formerly the Ancestry Daily News) will be in the Ancestry.com booth to answer your family history questions. Stop by the booth to sign up for a 10–minute, one–on–one time slot with Juliana.

The exhibit hall also features family history vendors from across the country. The exhibit hall is free to the public and is open:

• Thursday, September 3 — 9:30am – 5:00pm
• Friday, September 4 — 9:00am – 5:00pm
• Saturday, September 5 — 9:00am – 5:00pm

Digitize Your Family Records – Free to the Public
Ancestry.com is excited to provide conference attendees the opportunity to scan their family records, for free, on a high–speed scanner. It’s a unique opportunity to become familiar, first–hand, with the Ancestry.com record digitization process – as well as have your family history records digitized!

Details about Scanning

• Conference attendees will be able to sign up for 15–minute scanning sessions.
• Ancestry.com imaging specialists will be operating the scanner
• Ancestry.com will be using a high–speed, loose–leaf scanner that will scan documents and photographs in full color
• The scanner can scan about 200 family photographs or loose–leaf documents during a 15–minute session
• Scanned images will be saved to flash drives (provided at no cost by Ancestry.com) and given to attendees for their own personal use. (Note: Scanned images will NOT be uploaded to the Ancestry.com website by Ancestry.com personnel.)
• There is always a possibility that damage to older, more fragile documents may occur during the scanning process. Ancestry.com urges patrons to use their best judgment when choosing documents to be scanned.

Register today to attend the
Federation of Genealogical Societies Genealogy Conference.

We hope to see you in Little Rock!

The new television spots feature the following heartwarming stories:

A New Yorker Finds Answers about His Father – Alton Woodman (White Plains, N.Y.) never knew much about his dad, who passed away when Alton was just 14 years old. Turning to Ancestry.com, Alton found his father in a 1920 census record as a 14 year old himself, and discovered that he was attending an orphanage. To help connect the dots, Alton got in touch with a representative from the orphanage and received a package that offered a more complete picture of his father’s childhood.

Above: 1920 Census Record for Alton’s Father.

One Man Discovers His Great Grandfather was a War Hero – Cary Christopher (Pittsburgh and San Diego) always wondered about his German great grandfather, who disappeared after a short-lived marriage to Cary’s great grandmother ended in divorce. After 40 years of futile searching, Cary discovered his great grandfather in a World War I draft registration card on Ancestry.com. It turned out his great grandfather had immigrated to the United States before World War I, became a U.S. citizen and rose to the rank of Captain in the U.S. Merchant Marines, where he was killed by a torpedo fired by a German submarine during World War II.

South Florida Man Connects Father to His Own Mother – Jim Lane’s (Key Biscayne, Fla.) father never knew his mother, who died when he was an infant. Through historical records and member connection services on Ancestry.com, Jim discovered relatives who sent him pictures of his grandmother, and for the first time, Jim’s father was able to see a photograph of his mother.

Above: A picture of Jim’s Grandmother Donna.

Chicago Cook Meets Like-Minded Cousin – When caterer Peggy McDowell (Chicago) began researching the cooking talent in her family tree, she had no idea she would end up going into business with a long-lost cousin. Through searching records on Ancestry.com, she connected with her cousin, who also shares her passion for cooking. Together, they’re opening up a soul food restaurant in Chicago’s Hyde Park.

Here is an example of one of the spots, featuring Peggy:

Washington Woman Confirms Father’s Passing – Cathryn Darling (Olympia, Wash.) had many unanswered questions about her father, who had disappeared when she was eight years old after her parent’s divorce. After searching Ancestry.com’s obituary records, Cathryn learned her father died as a fisherman while at sea in Oregon in 1970, and she recently held a memorial service in his honor.

We hope you enjoy these stories as much as we do! Take a minute and check out the rest of the television spots, or read the press release.

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!