When you use the default settings in our search form (like the one shown below), we look through every name we have recorded in our more than 29,000 data collections, and pull out any record where the name is:

• Exactly what you typed
• A phonetic match of what you typed
• A name which has a similar meaning or spelling as the one you typed
• An initial that matches the name you typed
• We may also return records that do not match the name you typed in as described in this list, but strongly match other criteria

These records are also evaluated against the other criteria that you have given us, and are ordered based on how well all the elements in that record match your search.

You can restrict the search results to exact matches or exact matches and phonetic matches, names with similar meanings or setting or records where only initials are recorded. Simply click on “Use default settings” and choose “Restrict to exact matches and” along with your preferred option.

• Exact Matches: Records that contain a name that is exactly what you typed in will appear in your results.
• Phonetic Variations: There are other name matching algorithms that we can use to help identify records to consider for your results. If you choose phonetic, we will identify appropriate algorithms that apply to specific data collections and if a record has one of those names, we will use it as a possible record for your results set.
• Similar Variations: There are alternates and spelling variations that are commonly used, such as Will for William. If you choose this option we will look for records with these alternates and consider them as possible results for you to look at.
• Initial Variations: Sometimes in records our ancestors were identified with just their first initials, or the initials of their given and middle names. By including this option, you allow us to examine and possibly include records that just have initials in the first name. So if you enter Mary, we will look at records that have M as the first name.

Good luck with your search.

From 29 August – 6 September 2011, we are giving you free access to all our immigration and travel databases from around the world on Ancestry.com.au. Here are some tips on finding your migrant ancestor.

Speak to your relatives

As with many aspects of family history research, a good first step is to talk to your relatives about what they know about the family history. If the family migrated to Australia or New Zealand in the last two or three generations then they may be able to give you some very useful details about the ancestor who made the journey, when it took place and where he or she was from.

Surname clues

The surname of your ancestor may provide some useful clues in regard to the country of origin. Names such as Wood, Smith and Brown are British in origin. If you have Kelly ancestors, the chances are that they came from Ireland. Whilst there are no rules in regard to surname origins, the meaning and history of the name can be an important factor in determining the country of origin of the migrant ancestor.

The use of Death Certificates

Death certificates can help prove that your ancestor came from a particular place in a particular country. In Australia, for instance, death certificates may include how long the person had been living in Australia and the place of birth. This will help to identify when your ancestor came to Australia and where they came from.

Immigration Records

Once you have an idea as to when your migrant ancestor arrived in a particular country, you can search for them in passenger lists and other immigration records. Information found in these records will vary but may detail your ancestor’s age, birthplace, parentage, occupation and literacy skills.

Next steps

When you discover the birthplace of your migrant ancestor you can start to research their country of origin. Records available will vary from country to country and will depend on the time period in which your ancestor lived. If your ancestor was born in the UK, for instance, you can search birth, marriage and death certificates, census records and parish register material of baptism, marriage and burial.

Using these sources, you can begin to paint a rich portrait of your migrant ancestor and the lives they created in their new country.

Search for your migrant ancestor in our 200 million immigration and travel records at www.ancestry.com.au/travel for FREE until 9PM Tuesday 6 September 2011 (AEST).

Click here for tips on searching Australian immigration records.

Jeremy Palmer has been a full time professional genealogist since 1992. He was the Registrar at The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies in Canterbury, England for many years before emigrating to Australia where he now runs his own research business which specialises in tracing the British origins of families in Australia and New Zealand. He also lectures on a wide variety of family history topics for the Society of Australian Genealogists.

Three months ago, Ancestry and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum launched the World Memory Project. Since that time almost 2000 community contributors have indexed over 395,000 records across 15 different record collections. These records contain information about victims and survivors of the Holocaust and Nazi-era persecution.

We are proud to announce that this generous community completed indexing of the first of these collections in just 20 days.

USHMM: Munich, Germany, Displaced Jewish Children at the Ulm Children’s Home, 1945-1948

Following the surrender of the Nazis during World War II the Central Historical Commission of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the U.S. Zone, Munich (CHC) collected information about some of the child Holocaust survivors in the Displaced Persons camps. This particular database is an extracted index of CHC questionnaires created when Jewish children were brought to the Children’s Home in Ulm, Germany. The children range in age from four to nineteen and were asked about their lives during the Nazi rule, the fate of their families, their journey to Ulm postwar, and their desired immigration location.

There were only about 325 questionnaires indexed as part of this collection. But, as you can see, we captured each person listed, creating an index with information about more than 2700 individual family members.

Last week that index was published on Ancestry.com.au making these records freely available for anyone to search. Images of the original questionnaires, some with photos, can be obtained directly from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum using these ordering instructions.

We invite you to join us and participate in the World Memory Project where you can help make these victims’ records freely searchable online and restore the identities of people the Nazis tried to erase from history. Even a few minutes of your time can create a chance for family connections that transcend war and time.

As you may know, we launched our new Australian Immigration Collection last week. These records document the names and journeys of more than 14.5 million people who travelled to Australia between 1788 and 1923 in search of a new life.

But how do you get the most out of this collection? It all comes down to effective searching.

• Search for your ancestors by name and try to narrow the search with their age, dates of arrival, ports of departure or arrival, or country of origin.
• If you’re unsure of the spelling of your ancestors’ name, you can use wildcards to help return possible results.
• Think about how a name might be spelt phonetically; Gallagher and Callachor are the same name, just spelt differently depending upon the accent of the speaker and the ‘ear’ of the transcriber.
• Bear in mind that your immigrant ancestor may not have used the English version of his or her given name and that the surname may also have ethnic variants. This is most likely to be the case in records created when he first immigrated (e.g. passenger arrivals). Learn the ethnic equivalents and try searches in the immigrant’s native language
• Our ancestors didn’t always arrive in Australia in the same place that they settled so think a little laterally about their port of arrival – many people arrived in NSW only to take a costal ship to Brisbane or Melbourne at a later date (or travelled overland) so it always helps to broaden your search if you can’t find someone where you think they should be.
• When you find an immigration document, it’s important to look at the original image, which may contain additional information such as the name and address of your ancestor’s nearest relative, their intended destination in Australia, or names of other relatives travelling with them. If you find a record in an index collection or a transcription that is not linked to the actual record, follow the link to “Learn more about this database” to find out how to order the original record.
• Be sure to note and research the names of witnesses and fellow passengers from the same place in immigration records. They were often relatives, employers, or friends from the immigrant’s previous home. Tracing these individuals in census, directory, or immigration records may help you learn about your ancestor’s life before and after they arrived in Australia.
• Once you find a matching immigration record, save it to your family tree – that way you can provide evidence to back up the info in your family tree, easily share your discover with your family, and quickly find the historical record again later.

These records have already helped many people find ‘loose ends’ in their family tree. Hopefully they’ll do the same for you!

Search the Australian Immigration Collection today.

Last October we launched Ancestry Labs to test a few new ideas, and we’d like to thank all those members who contributed a lot of great feedback and discussion around these.  Today we’re excited to announce the introduction of one of the ideas, Web Search, into the main Ancestry.com.au search.

Why are we launching Web Search?

We’ve heard from many members that although Ancestry.com.au has the broadest collections of historical records available, it certainly isn’t completely comprehensive. Every day, digital records are being published on sites across the web, many of which are free to access.

These sites can be a great resource in helping break through brick walls, however, it can be hard to know where to find sites that are relevant to your ancestors, and it also takes time to work out the best way to search them once you do manage to track them down.

To help solve this, we are launching a new feature that searches select websites and brings back any matching results we find, along with a link to the site to enable you to go straight to the original record. Where relevant, we will include these results into your main search results. We will also list each collection we have within our card catalog, which will allow you to search those collections directly from within Ancestry.com.au.

Principles we will follow

As we’ve been developing Web Search, we’ve spoken with many members within the genealogical community to try to make sure we approach this in the right way. We recognise that this content is really important to every single site owner, and we believe it’s important we respect the wishes of these owners regarding links to their content.

From these discussions, we have developed some principles on how this service will work:

• Free access to Web Records – Users do not have to subscribe or register with Ancestry.com.au to view these records.
• We will always strive to follow web standards for web crawling permissions.  For example, some websites have a robots.txt file that instructs search engines (like Google) to not crawl the site, or to only crawl certain areas.
• Proper attribution of Web Records to content publishers – we will link prominently to the original site within the search experience.
• We have in place processes to remove content from the index if a website owner requests us to do that and we will publish how to contact our team to do this.  Website owners can also contact us to ask questions or to request their site be indexed – see this page to learn how to contact us: http://www.ancestry.com.au/websearch.
• Ancestry.com.au users will be able to save key information to their trees but it will list the website as the source and will have an easy way to link back to the original site.

How does it work?

When you do a search on Ancestry.com.au, if we find a relevant match in a record on a site we have indexed, we will include that match in your search results.

You can view the essential information in the search results list, click on a link to visit the website, or click on the information to view a little more and save it to your tree. You don’t have to subscribe or even have a guest account with Ancestry.com.au to find and view this information or to get to the source website.  Of course, if you want to save it to your online tree, you will need to login or create a free account so we know where to save the information.

To designate which of these records are from Ancestry.com.au and which are found via web search, we are prefacing the source information with “Web:” and then the name of the collection.  For example: “Web: Rootsweb Obituary Index”. There is also an icon next to the name indicating this is a web record.

You will also see a link under the title that will go straight to the website.  If you are using new search, you will also find a special icon next to the title.

When you click on the name of the collection, you will get to this page:

This page only contains the essential information needed to find the information and to make sure it is the person for whom you are searching.

In the same way you should always check the image when you look at an index, make sure you go to the web site to see what other information is there.  You will usually find additional information – reference and publication information, grave site locations, ways to order the original record, notes, and sometimes even images.

Going to the original website

The first time you click on a link to go to an external website, you will see a message that looks like this:

We want to make sure users know a few things about this experience. First of all, the content is not on Ancestry.com.au and the site will open in a new tab, or a new window (depending on your browser.)  Secondly, when you get to the website, you may have to search for the record. Some sites have static URLs so we can help you get straight to the record. Other sites dynamically generate the page for the record so you have to search when you get there.

If you don’t want to see this message in the future, just check the box in the lower right hand portion of the screen “Don’t show this message again.”

Can I search just one collection of web records?

Yes, you can do this.  There are a few ways to search just one set of records from a website.

If you are looking at a single record on Ancestry.com.au, just click the title of the collection and it will take you to a search page for that collection.

This will take you to a search page that will look something like this:

You can also find the individual search forms by going to the card catalog and searching on the name of the collection.  If you don’t know, just search on the word “web” in the title since we will include the word “web” to denote they come from an external source and not from Ancestry.com.

How fast will we grow the Web Search service?

We plan to add sites to our index gradually so we can learn about how useful they are to users. Today, we are launching Web Search with select websites but expect to add many more websites to help our users find more information about their ancestors.

Go try it out

The best way to understand this is to try it out.  Since we are starting out small, you may not see these results in your search results for your ancestors, yet.  (If you do, please let us know if it was helpful.)

You can see it in action by doing a search for Louise M Chrisman, died in Indiana, USA or click here to see the search results.

In the example above, the first result is for Louise in “Web: Allen County, Indiana Deaths 1870-1920.”

We would like your feedback

We hope this answers many of your questions.  We have appreciated all of the feedback we have gotten so far and look forward to continuing to learn from our users, from web publishers, and from others in the community.

We have a page with general information on this service at www.ancestry.com.au/websearch.  On this page, you will find a summary of some of this information as well as ways to contact us.

If you own a website or publish content, we have a special message board where you can ask questions and share your suggestions with us at http://boards.ancestry.com.au/content-publishers-feedback/mb.ashx.

If you publish family history records on the web, you can ask your site to be searched, or request your site not be searched, by emailing us at websearch@ancestry.com.

We also invite any of our users to share their thoughts and suggestions with us at the same email address – websearch@ancestry.com.

Happy Searching!

1. Explore surnames: cross-reference surnames in your family tree with those found in Burke’s Commoners and Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland as this group, mostly descended from royalty or the aristocracy, is when the number of high-born commoners first tended to reach a critical mass.

2. Seek out wealth: look for evidence of wealthy ancestors through domestic staff listings on census records, property and businesses documented in wills and probate records and ancestors who were extensive travellers listed in immigration records travelling in First Class.

3. Investigate titles: if any of your ancestors had titles, explore the age and origins of those titles.

4. Look for places: for surnames in your family tree that are also the name of a place – for example a town or parish – do further research to establish any connection between that ancestor and significant ownership in that location.

5. Find the Normans: investigate whether any of the surnames in your family tree has Norman origins and if so, research that particular branch of the family as far back as you can as many early Normans had direct royal connections.

Over the past year, we have been working with a wide range of Ancestry 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).

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

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 Melbourne in 1952.

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.au/search. Under the navigation bar on the right, you’ll see the link “Go to Old Search”. Click on this, and you’ll be back on the Old Search form.

Happy Searching!

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

Add an Event

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. Even in advanced, the search form didn’t give you as much specificity about 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.

Any Event

You may have noticed the “Any Event” option on some of these new search forms. Sometimes you don’t know for certain 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, electoral, you name it.

Happy Searching!

Recently we launched the first of these changes to the forms, which provides some new ways to enter details of family members into your search.

There are two main differences:

1. We’ve split the names of family members from just one name box into two, supporting first name and last name.  This can be really important if you’re searching for a marriage record and don’t know the maiden name of the spouse.
2. We’ve added in the ability to simply add more relationships based on what you know, for example if you know multiple siblings – this helps to quickly create a really powerful search query.

One more thing. If you are using advanced search we’ll also allow you to select exact for either the first or last name of a mother or a father.

To find this, you need to click the “Tell us more to get better results” link at the bottom of the search form:

If you click on that link, you will see under “Lived In (Residence)” and “Marriage Info”, the “Family Member” section:

You will see that you can choose from Father, Mother, Spouse, Child or Sibling. To add more than one, click the “Add Row” box.

If you are in advanced search, you also can choose Exact Only on Father or Mother. Remember if you choose exact only, the record must have that value — so if a record doesn’t have a Father in it and you choose it as exact, then we won’t return it.

You will also find this update on all family member areas on category and data collection forms.

Birth, Marriage & Death Records

BMD Records often have wonderful relationship data in them — specifying family members in your search query will help us narrow down the results we give you.

Lets say you have one of those common ancestor names, William Smith, and you are trying to find out who he married. You start at the Birth, Marriage and Death form and you are in the advanced form, because you like to take advantage of our name filters.

You enter Peter as a first name, and set the filters to “exact, phonetic, similiar and initials” because you know Peter has a lot of variations.

You enter Jones as a last name, and set the filters to “exact, phonetic, and similiar”.

You also know that Peter’s father was named William and his mother’s name was Mary. So you scroll down to where you enter Family Members and enter that information. I recommend that you do not start with exact, you never know which pieces of information are recorded or indexed for family members and it’s a good idea to start with using this information as a way for us to rank records instead of excluding records.

Press “Search” and you’ll see records from everywhere, and over 400,000!

It’s a good time to refine your search and take advantage of our location filter. Press “r” on your keyboard for “refine search”, and let’s say you know Peter was probably married in Sydney… use the type ahead and start typing Sydney:

Select “Sydney, New South Wales, Australia”, then click on “Use default settings” and choose one of the filters, say “Restrict to this place exactly” and perform your search.

One important caveat here

When we used to search family members, we didn’t search last names, just first and middle names. So we are in the process of indexing all the family member last names on the site. We have over 4 billion records, so it may take us a while to get caught up. So if you type in a last name and choose exact and get no results, it means we haven’t indexed family member last names on that collection yet. We’ll let you know when we are caught up.

Happy Searching!

Here’s what you will see:

New search homepage

The new search homepage will have updated navigation, maps, and access to both recent searches and recently viewed data collections.

Map on search homepage

You will be able to browse the data collections that are unique to or related to specific places.

Example of a place page

There will be thousands of new place pages for countries, states, territories, provinces and counties. For those of you who use old search, you may recognise that we have updated and improved the place pages you have seen in old search.

You can view the data collections Ancestry has for each location. For many locations you can find links to extra resources and a history of the important events that occurred in that place. Look for the “History” and “Resource” buttons.

Example of recent searches and recently viewed data collections

The new search homepage will provide access to your recent searches and to a new page that contains a list of the data collection homepages that you mostly recently visited. These features will be displayed on the new search homepage after you do a search or after you visit a data collection homepage.

Please note: Old search will not be updated; these changes only apply to new search. If your search page does not look like the pictures in this blog post, you may be using old search. You can switch to new search by clicking on the “new search” link at the top right corner of the search homepage.

We hope you enjoy using these new search pages and that you find navigating Ancestry.com.au has improved.

Take a tour of the recent and upcoming changes to Ancestry.com.au search