If you use Internet Explorer

Go to www.ancestry.com.au and click on the star icon in the top right corner of your Internet Explorer browser, click Add to Favourites and then click Add.

The next time you want to visit Ancestry, simply open your Internet Explorer Browser, click on the star icon and you will see a link to the Ancestry site. Simply click on the link and begin your family history research.

If you use Google Chrome

Go to the Ancestry website using Google Chrome, click on the star icon and give your bookmark a name, like Ancestry.com.au for example. Choose the folder as “Bookmarks Bar” and click done. Next time you open Google Chrome, there will be a link to Ancestry in your bookmark bar. The name will be whatever you chose to call your bookmark. Simply click on it to visit the site and get started on your research.

If you use Firefox

Go to www.ancestry.com.au, click on the star icon and name your bookmark e.g. Ancestry.com.au. Choose the folder “Bookmarks Menu” and click Done. Next time you open Firefox, click on the Bookmarks Menu and there will be a link to Ancestry saved there. The name will be whatever you chose to call your bookmark. Simply click on the link and go to Ancestry.com.au to begin your research.

If you use Safari

Find out more about adding Favourites using Safari here.

Last year, we launched the Interactive Image Viewer as an interactive tool to help you view and interpret information from many of the Census records available online. We’re excited to announce that the Interactive Image Viewer will now be available for several more collections in the coming weeks. Finding and understanding historical records is one of the most exciting and important parts of family history, so we’ve been working hard to make an intuitive and enjoyable experience that will work for different Web browsers and devices. Although we still have work to do, here are a few changes you’ll find:

Ever wonder if there are new hints you haven’t seen hiding in your family tree? Now it’s easy to see new hints when they come your way—we’ve just released a feature to notify you when you get new hints. You may have noticed when you last visited Ancestry.com.au that the menu bar in the top-right corner of the site looks different. In addition to a new design, there’s now a leaf; a red number will appear on the leaf when you have new hints waiting for you.

From anywhere on the site you can click on the leaf in the menu bar to see a list of your new hints and review them right away or come back to them later. Clicking on an individual hint will take you to the Person Hint List to review hints for that person, and clicking on “See all recent hints” takes you to the All Hints Page to review all hints in your tree, which are listed by the most recent.

If you have several trees, but are only active on some of them, you can also set your preferences so you’re only notified about hints in the trees you’re actively working on. Hint Preferences are located on the Site Preferences page – just click on Site Preferences from the dropdown menu under your username.

Additionally, we’ve heard from some members that they are less interested in hints to other member trees than other hints, such as record hints.  We want to make sure that this new feature, as well as Ancestry Hints in general, is useful to everyone.  Now in Hint Preferences (found in Site Preferences) you can choose whether to display your Member Tree hints or not. This setting can remove Member Tree hints from the tree viewer, hint notifications, hint lists, hint counts, etc. Member Tree hints are still accessible, however they’ll only be found in the Member Tree view on the All Hints page (it will say “OFF”, but you can still click to see any Member Tree hints you may have). If you turn Member Tree hints back on they’ll reappear throughout the site.

We hope that these new features will help you to get the most from the hints in your family tree and make more meaningful discoveries. Let us know what you think – leave a comment below or post on our Facebook wall.

Where can you try it out?

This beta viewer is available for the following censuses:

• 1911 England Census
• 1911 Channel Islands Census
• 1911 Wales Census
• 1911 Isle of Man Census
• 1930 US Federal Census

You can access the interactive image beta viewer from the record page by clicking on “Try Now” under Learn more with our interactive image viewer.

How can you send feedback?

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

What’s new?

Family Highlights

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

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

Informative Tips

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

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

Change locations by browsing

Change the focus of your browsing by selecting a new location directly from the image browse path.

Moving the image

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

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

Actions Menu

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

• Print – Print the image or the current view.
• View Index – See a transcription of the key fields underneath the image.
• View highlighting – By default, household highlights are displayed on the image. Select this menu item to disable household highlights.
• View source – Select this menu item to open the source panel and learn which organization provided the image.

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

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

What features are coming soon?

• Improvements to save to tree – Saving to tree is available but the features which recognize whether you have come from a hint or if you have already saved this image are not implemented yet.
• Comments and corrections – We will add the ability to provide comments and corrections soon. We value all of your additions to our records.
• Sharing – Sharing the image via email, Facebook, or Twitter is coming soon.

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

You can find hints that have been generated in the last 90 days or focus on specific types of hints (from records, photos, story or member tree hints). You can also use filters to focus on the most interesting hints.

To view the new All Hints page, go to your tree view, mouse over the find a person in your tree text box and choose List of all people -

When you see all the people in your tree, click on “Hints” -

You will now see your All Hints Page.

If you click on Recent, you will see the latest hints we’ve found. If you want to focus on a specific type of hint, you can click on Record, Photo, Story or Member Tree.

You can also search and sort by first or last name -

Have a look at your own All Hints page and see what you can find.

Happy searching!

Thanks to all of you who have provided feedback on the Beta Image Viewer on the blog, via the message boards, through the survey, and directly via email (feedback-imageviewer@ancestry.com). We appreciate the input – both positive and negative – and have used it to further improve the viewer.

Today, an updated version of the viewer is on the site. If you aren’t already started using the new viewer, you can get to it by clicking the Options button in the green toolbar above the image. You can switch back to a different viewer the same way.

 

The updated viewer includes

• Print the Current View
• Better keyboard support for zoom and panning
• Better support for Newspapers and similar collections
• Improved performance

Print the Current View

You can now print the current view of the image. This is the most-often requested print feature that we had in the previous Advanced Image Viewer. Position the image in the viewer (zoom in or out, move the image where you want it), click the Print button, and then select the Print the current view option. A preview window will appear and the Print dialog should open. (We generally recommend printing in Landscape; you can select that in the printer properties).

Better keyboard support for zoom and panning

The previous version did not have full keyboard support for zooming and panning on all of the browsers. We believe this is corrected. The + and – keys on both the keyboard and keypad now work for zooming in or out. Arrow keys, as well as Page Up and Page Down keys, are supported for panning. Home will take you to the left side of the image; End will take you to the right side of the image.

Better support for newspapers and similar collections

We have improved our support for newspapers and similar collections (those that are processed with Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, technology). The viewer will now highlight the search terms and center the current hit within the viewer. Additionally, the Next Hit button should work.

Improved performance

We continue to work on performance issues to make the new viewer (and the underlying services which support it) faster and more responsive. There are still steps to take, but we hope you find that the experience continues to improve over time.

Other miscellaneous improvements

There are other improvements you may notice as you work with the new viewer. Images should now load to the “Fit Width” zoom level by default. The viewer now remembers your zoom settings as you move between images in a collection so you don’t have to reset it as you browse between images during the current session. And we prevent the new viewer from showing up on iOS devices (such as the iPad).

Thank you again for your feedback!

We will continue to make updates to the image viewer. We appreciate your feedback and hope that you will continue to use the survey (click the “What’s Changed” link at the top of the image viewer) and email address (feedback-imageviewer@ancestry.com) to let us know what you think of the image viewer.

Regards,

Jim Mosher

Several years ago, we launched the Advanced Image Viewer. This viewer provided some much-needed capabilities and was welcomed by our members who could take advantage of it. Our other members – almost 50% of our total base – continued to use a basic image viewer which provided somewhat limited capabilities. Over time, as browsers changed, the Advanced Image Viewer worked for fewer and fewer of our members.

Today, we are pleased to announce that a new (beta) image viewer is available on the site. This new viewer should be useable by the majority of our customers while still providing the “advanced” capabilities of the previous viewer.

We have created this experience in a way that will make it easier and faster for us to support the most popular viewer technologies. For the present, this is Adobe Flash; in the future, we anticipate this will evolve towards technologies such as HTML 5 as browsers that support those technologies are more broadly adopted by our users.

Summary of key features

• Faster image loading. We’ve invested in the backend services that power the image viewing experience. We’ll continue to optimise and improve performance, but this experience should be faster for most of our members.
• Works on more platforms and with more browsers. Windows and Macintosh. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.
• New and improved features. Rotate, mirror, and better zoom controls are new for all users. Magnify, thumbnail view, and enhanced images are new for anyone who couldn’t use the previous Advanced Image Viewer.
• Familiar interface. The basic user interface around the viewer is relatively unchanged. Some of the interactions have changed (such as zoom and pan controls).
• Simplified installation experience. For most of you, the viewer will just work. Some of you will first need to install a more recent version of Adobe Flash.
• BETA. We’re still working on this. There are some known issues. We’re also taking feedback for further improvements. Let us know what you think at feedback-imageviewer@ancestry.com.

What this means to you

Some of you will start seeing the new viewer immediately. Everyone can choose to enable the new viewer. If you don’t like the new viewer, you can go back to using the old viewer. Over time, we will be directing more and more people to the new viewer.

To switch to the new viewer (or switch back to the old viewer), click the Options button and then click on the viewer you wish to use. (Your options may be different than what is shown below, based on your browser and operating system.)

What’s new

The new viewer, and the backend services we’ve built out to support it, is faster, feature rich, and easier to install. It retains the general capabilities of the previous Advanced Image Viewer and adds some new features that our customers have requested. It runs on both Windows and Macintosh operating systems. It is supported on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. And it is available now.

When you first look at the new viewer, you may not notice many changes from the previous Advanced Image Viewer. If you are used to the Standard Image Viewer, there will be some new features to try out. Regardless, we have tried to keep the user experience very similar. There are a few changes that we’d like to point out:

What’s Changed. We’ve added a link that describes what has changed and takes you to a survey so you can provide us with feedback on the new viewer. Let us know what you think!

Rotate and Mirror. Two new features are available on the toolbar. Rotating an image 90 degrees at a time or mirroring it (flipping it over) can make reading some images easier.

Zoom drop down. We have updated the options in the zoom drop down: Fit Image, Fit Width, Fit Height, and Full Size give you broad control over the initial size of the image. Additionally, we have removed the percentage-based zoom options.

Zoom controls. The Zoom in/Zoom out buttons remain to help you zoom in or out on an image. We have also added support for zooming in and out using the scroll wheel on your mouse or using the plus (+) and minus (-) keys on your number keypad.

Image Manipulation. Use the mouse to click and drag an image around on the screen. Alternately, use the arrow keys to move the image. Please note that there are no scroll bars within the viewer.

What else has changed

Other changes may be more subtle. You will notice that images load to the “Fit Width” zoom value. Images start out a little fuzzy and then clarify – this is due to the “Deep Zoom” technology we are using to optimise download speeds (we don’t download the entire image all at once, which make the image faster to load). The Magnify option actually magnifies a bit more than the previous version.

Printing & Saving

We had to make some changes to the Print and Save Image features. This version doesn’t support a “Print Current View,” which the previous Advanced Image Viewer did. “Print Current View” should be available before the end of the year. Saving an image is also different. If you have been using Chrome or Firefox, saving was a right-click operation. You will now need to click the Save button and select “Save this image.” The file will then be downloaded by the browser.

Known issues

Yes, this is a Beta release. Yes, there are things that aren’t quite the way we want them to be. And, yes, we want your feedback so we can continue to improve.

For this release, there are a few known issues:

• Zooming in and out using the “+” and “-” key on the top of your keyboard doesn’t work. It should work with the “+” and “-” on the numeric keypad. Except that…
• Zooming out using the “-” key doesn’t work with Chrome, and…
• Scrolling the image using the arrow keys doesn’t work with Safari.
• The popup that displays when you first load the new viewer is currently English only.
• If you resize your browser window , or have the Member Connect/Source panel open, some of the toolbar options may wrap on the screen.
• While we highlight terms in our OCR collections (such as newspapers), this version doesn’t move and center the image on the current highlight.
• There are a few odd cases where canceling the install of Adobe Flash on older browsers can cause the browser to crash.

With the exception of the Adobe Flash issue, we plan on fixing all of the other items. You won’t need to do a new download or make any changes – they should just start working as we roll out the updates.

Faster image loading. New and improved features. A familiar interface. A new viewer.

We hope you will try it out. Let us know what you think. Click on the “What’s Changed” link in the viewer to learn more and to take a survey. Or send a message to us at feedback-imageviewer@ancestry.com. If you like it, we want to know. If you don’t like it, we want to know. And if you have problems with it – especially if images don’t load correctly – we want to know (please let us know which collection you were viewing).

We look forward to your feedback!

Best regards,

Jim Mosher
Search Product Management

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!

Using the app, just log in to your Ancestry.com.au account from anywhere to access your tree, edit information, upload photos, add a note — even add a long-lost family member. Plus, you can see shared trees and view records and source citations on the go.

Whether you’re a seasoned family history expert or just getting started with genealogy, this new app can help you grow your Ancestry.com.au family tree wherever and whenever you make discoveries.

With this helpful mobile tree tool, you can see all the family trees you’ve already created on Ancestry.com.au. Just download the free app from the iTunes store to your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, log in to your Ancestry.com.au account and choose a family tree.

You can browse names in your tree or search for a specific person. Click on a relative to view, then edit or add vital information, immediate family members, life events, notes or new ancestors. You can even take photos of your relatives, historical documents, keepsakes, antiques, buildings and more with your iPhone and upload them directly to your tree.

Just discovered a treasure trove of family heirlooms at your second cousin’s house? Take pictures and upload them to your tree with stories about each one. Found a forgotten family member’s headstone as you traverse an 18^th century cemetery? Add this new person and upload an image of their gravesite. Now when you’re on the go, your family tree – and all your family history – goes with you.

Download the Ancestry app for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad