Using Ancestry.com: Preparing for the Message Board Improvements Launch, by Juliana Smith

Last month, there were 28,127,757 page views on the Ancestry.com/RootsWeb.com message boards and on April 30 there were more than one million for that day alone! That’s a lot of people looking for ancestors and sharing their research interests!

Message boards have long been popular, and even before we took to the Internet, genealogists had been posting their interests in periodicals and probably on cave walls long before that. (And you think we have it tough entering our data! One date entered wrong and you’d have to move to a new cave and start over.)

There will likely be another surge in popularity as Ancestry.com and RootsWeb.com will soon be updating and improving the message boards, based on the recommendations of community members. Improvements will allow users to create customized views of each thread and select how many posts are displayed on a page. Notifications of posts to your favorite boards will be sent individually or via a digest version. New tools will also help with posts allowing you to edit and spell check your messages.

There will also be some behind-the-scenes improvements with more powerful searches and spam blockers, that will hopefully spare us from all those lovely pharmaceutical ads.

Besides the enhancements, there will be another boon for those who use the message boards regularly in the form of the increased traffic that will come with the launch. So if you’re a message board user, now is a good time to make sure your e-mail address is up-to-date and your posts are current. If you haven’t posted to the message boards, it’s a perfect time to start.

So let’s take a look at some ways we can leverage the launch to improve our chances of finding that long-lost cousin with the information that could break down some of those brick walls.

Finding Your Old Posts
If you’ve posted before, step one will be to locate your old posts. In the message board box on the main Community page (http://www.ancestry.com/community/) click on Try Our Advanced Search. There, enter your name in the box that says Author of Message and click Find. You should end up with a list of all your posts that you can review and update if necessary.
 

Update Your E-Mail
One of the great things about message boards is that your message stays out there for people who join the search much later. So if Cousin Myrtis is finally bitten by the genealogy bug years from now, she can find you through your post of today. The only hitch is that your e-mail address needs to be current or she won’t be able to send you all that info from the family Bible.

As part of the overall updates to the boards, the “Board Profile” will be replaced by your Ancestry “My Public Profile.” This means that your member name and the e-mail associated with your Ancestry account will replace the current “Post Name” and “Post E-mail” as the author and contact for your posts. For this reason it’s important that you’re e-mail address is current in the “My Accounts” section. Also, you may wish to update your username and e-mail address to something that you don’t mind being associated with all of your message board posts.
 

Updating Posts
Now say you put a query out there looking for info on your great-grandpa John Smith. You knew his father’s name at the time of the post (he was another John Smith), but not the mother and had no clue as to his place of birth. It would really help if you could provide some info that would make him stand out from the other bazillion John Smiths, but back in 2003 when you posted it, that was all you had.

Now let’s say you discovered his mother was named Hildegard Hemperphistle and that he had been born in Posen, Cook County, Illinois. (I think all ancestors with common names should have been required to marry spouses with unusual given names and surnames to at least give us a fair chance at identifying them!) How do we get that information into the post so that when that nice wave of searchers anxious to try out the updated message boards comes through, they’ll be able to find your post? You can do this by replying to the original post with your new information added. Not only will this allow you to be found by the Smiths who know about the Hemperphistle-Smith marriage, but Hemperphistle cousins will also be able to find you through their searches as well.

With the launch of the message boards you will be able to go back and edit live posts that have not been replied to, adding and correcting information.
 

Keys to a Good Post
Posting effective messages is the key to your success, and there are certain elements that should be included in your post.

  • A good subject line. If you post to the Smith list that you’re “Looking for Smiths,” you’re not going to stand out. After all, presumably everyone on the list is “looking for Smiths.” Give them as much detail as possible to help reel in the right cousins. Something like this:
     SMITH, Joseph Z., 1838-1864, Eng>NY>Iowa
    If you’re not certain of the dates, you can estimate and use ca. (circa) to note it. 
  • Give them details upfront, listing who you are looking for, where and when, so they don’t have to read on only to discover they have the wrong person five paragraphs later. Then you can go into more detail, explaining where you’ve searched, sharing family stories you’d like to verify, etc.
  • Re-read your post from another perspective. Pretend you’re the answer to your genealogical prayers coming to respond to your post. Re-read it and be sure that you have included all the necessary information. Since we all know our own ancestors so well, it’s easy to forget that other people don’t and omit crucial information.

Sit Back and Wait?
Now that your posts are all in order, you can sit back and wait for people to find you. It’s basically free advertising for you. But I’m guessing that’s not what you’ll be doing. If you’re like me, you’re going to be off searching for ancestors as soon as you’re done. We family historians typically aren’t of the “sit and wait” variety!
 
Click here to learn more about the improved boards.

Juliana Smith has been the editor of Ancestry.com newsletters for more than seven years and is author of “The Ancestry Family Historian’s Address Book.” She has written for “Ancestry” Magazine and “Genealogical Computing.” Juliana can be reached by e-mail at: [email protected], but she regrets that her schedule does not allow her to assist with personal research.

12 thoughts on “Using Ancestry.com: Preparing for the Message Board Improvements Launch, by Juliana Smith

  1. If I understand the “Update your E-Mail” section, we will not have the option of where we want people to contact us with any message postings, and that Ancestry will automatically assume” the right to use the email address that our newsletters come to? We have just changed servers and have a mess trying to change and notify all. Therefore my hope was to use another server to only receive correspondence on mail lists. Is this true? Eileen Holt

  2. The changes sound wonderful. I’m wondering though if this will affect the ‘Surname Lists’ on RootsWeb. There you have an option to join an additional surname mailing list where you can send ‘to the list only’ posts and receive ‘from the list only’ posts.

    It sounds like the features you are describing for the update will provide basically the same service. (Emails delivered to your address instead of having to log onto the site to read the posts.) So it sounds like the services will duplicate each other. Will there still be Surname lists on RootsWeb?

    I was told that all the posts from the RootsWeb message board come to the Surname list, but nothing you post on the Surname List goes to the Board. Am I right in understanding that now all the posts from the message board and the replys you make will automatically show up on the board and go to private email addresses at the same time if we have accepted that option?

    Thanks..Barb 🙂

  3. I know when I find a lead on a message board and the author leaves an Email address, it’s frustrating when the address is no longer in use.

    I never use my Server’s Internet account when I post a message, for the very reason that we change Internet providers. Anyone who posts a message should open a hotmail, yahoo, or any other account that is free. That way if you like to use your servers Email account, you still can, and you can use the hotmail or yahoo account for the message boards. It will stay the same even if you change providers.

    Something else to remember is that some providers make it difficult to access your account from other locations. Having an account like Hotmail or yahoo, you can access it from anywhere.

    Rhonda Cunningham

  4. Very interesting, but confussing results. First attempt found
    4578, NO WAY. Showed anything with the letter “O” contained.
    Fifth try as “Jack OConnor” with qoutes, first showed 225 om
    message boards. This appears correct. Then returning to All
    Results the following results:Ancestry World Tree 0, Family Data
    Collection 1, Message Boards 447, One World Tree 32. I have never
    posted to One World Tree (and probably never will). When I go to one of MY Message Board postings and click on My name as author
    the following listings show 223 postings which appears correct.
    I hope the IMPROVED method show more accurate information.

  5. Very interesting, but confussing results. First attempt found
    4578, NO WAY. Showed anything with the letter “O” contained.
    Fifth try as “Jack OConnor” with qoutes, first showed 225 on
    message boards. This appears correct. Then returning to All
    Results the following results:Ancestry World Tree 0, Family Data
    Collection 1, Message Boards 447, One World Tree 32. I have never
    posted to One World Tree (and probably never will). When I go to one of MY Message Board postings and click on My name as author
    the following listings show 223 postings which appears correct.
    I hope the IMPROVED method show more accurate information.

  6. I want to be able to print an article without the messages and comment space at the bottom. Thanks, Lola

  7. good article
    You might correct the you’re/your mistake in one of the paragraphs.

  8. I am so new at using the computer and terminology, I’m not sure of what I am doing. I just started w/Ancestry and the assistance has been great and led me down quite a few paths with results. I THINK what I need to do is FOCUS. The Newsletters are great – this is my second one. When I log on, I go for the photo corner: when I “learn how”, I can photo the cover and inside cover (in my father’s handwriting) of this book my father gave my mother when they we dating. THANKS!!!

  9. Hi,Juliana, and thanks for your remedial instructions. I look forward to using the new system. Please note tht my address has changed, although [email protected] will be good for another few weeks. How do I change to my new address? George Potter

  10. I do not see a “Print this Page” on the site. Am I missing something? If not, do I have to “copy and paste”? We did not have to do this in the old Ancestry Daily News. Thank you for the interesting posts each week. You are doing a great job!

  11. As a “retired” widow, grandmother of 17, I have small resources and lots of demands – I sure wish I could avoid some brick walls without going into bankrupcy:0(

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