Contributed by Pam Hammerstein
Pam’s great aunt Edith Parkers mother, Roseanna, stepfather, William Hatherley Clarke, and one of their children possibly William as a baby.

Recent messages suggest that there is some confusion surrounding the new Member Trees, so here is some additional information to help clarify some of the details. When creating a tree through the new member trees, you are not required to make it public. There are several options available.

You can choose to make your tree publicly viewable, or you can choose to not make it public. You can choose the latter by de-selecting the box that says, “Allow others to see my tree as a public member tree and allow my tree information to be compiled into OneWorldTree.” This box is on the page where you give your tree a name. When you de-select that box, you see a yellow box appear that tells you,

• Even if you don’t share your tree, other members can still learn if a specific deceased individual is in your tree, in addition to the birth year and birthplace of the person and your username (but no personal information about you).
• They can then contact you anonymously through Ancestry’s Connection Service to request more information . . .

Ancestry.com’s Connection Service is available through a premium membership, such as U.S. or World Deluxe, or through a basic Family Trees & Connections membership ($19.95 per year).  If someone chooses to try to connect to you, you will receive a message like the one below. Continue reading →

History students, teachers, professional historians, local history buffs who can’t take off from work, and genealogists throughout the Midwest have a new opportunity.  The National Archives and Records Administration – Great Lakes Region, at 7358 South Pulaski Road in Chicago, now offers public research hours on the first Saturday of every month.  Researchers will be able to examine original historical documents of the United States Government and microfilm copies of commonly used federal records, such as the 1790-1930 census schedules and the records of the Freedmen’s Bureau, from 8:00 AM through 4:15 PM on the first Saturday of every month. Continue reading →

8/14/2006 P.S. to this message: Thanks to everyone for writing in. An update was posted to this message on 8/11/2006. Future updates will also be posted here as changes are made.

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In an ongoing effort to help users locate relevant content for their family history, Ancestry.com has made some significant changes to the site, particularly in the areas of searching and online trees.

Additional enhancements are also in the works, in the form of a new Advanced Search tool that will give more advanced users more search options, including the ability to specify birth/marriage/death information, parents’ names, spouses, relevant locations, and keywords. Each field will include the option to mark it as an exact match or fuzzy match.

Recent changes include:

• Creation of a new search form tailored to each type of content to make searches more effective. The information in Ancestry.com databases is not homogenous. While most databases contain information that has been tagged as a name, date, or place, many databases do not have this information tagged or even contain names, dates or places at all. (A map, for example, typically doesn’t contain an ancestor’s name.) This makes it difficult to provide you with all of the information available for your family history. It’s also very difficult to rank these different types of matches against each other properly. That’s why we made a search interface tailored to find each type of content most effectively.

• Replaced the Exact Search tab with a checkbox option (“Exact matches only”) on the search form so that we could use tabs to display different types of content that you can search for on Ancestry (e.g., Stories & Publications, Photos & Maps, etc.) Continue reading →