World Archives Project

For those of us working in the World Archives Project we often ask that question about the names we key everyday.  For example, Ernest Simpson whom I keyed recently from the Michigan Passenger & Crew, lists.   Ernest Simpson was a sheet metal worker born in London, England.  He was 5′ 51/2″ tall with brown hair, […]

Last week we released the UK, Prison Hulk Registers and Letter Books, 1802-1849 – if you are not familiar with the history of these records and what the Prison Hulks were it would be worthwhile doing a little research.  Just a little tidbit of information is that although the ships were only supposed to be used […]

To end our week, and to complete our list of recent changes, we released a new version of the keying tool earlier today.  Each time you use the keying tool we check for updates so there is no need to manually update the tool.  In this latest version of the tool we’ve resolved a few […]

About a week and a half ago we held our first ever virtual keying party.  Were you there?  We had a few people ask questions, several people share what projects they were working on, and we had more than double the number of records keyed during those few hours than during similar time periods.   […]

Tonight, Wednesday, February 17, starting around 11:30 pm MST (Thursday, February 18 – 6:30 AM in London and 5:30 PM in Sydney) Ancestry.com will be down to perform site maintenance work.  During this time you will not be able to access any online resources – the message boards, help articles and project pages – and you will not be able to download image […]

We have two new items that I wanted to make sure everyone knows about.  In order of importance… We now have a new email address to contact our support team, worldarchivessupport@ancestry.com.  This email address and the Provide Feedback link (look for changes coming to this link and page in the future) will both reach our support […]

We are excited to have released two new projects in the past week! The London, England, School Admissions and Discharges, 1841-1911 were released last week – there are currently 350 contributors working on the project and they have already keyed 65,000 records!  This collection is comprised of records for millions of students (names and birth dates) who attended school in […]

If so, be sure to follow us – @WorldArchives.  And, if you are around tonight join us for our first ever Virtual Keying Party. We have held a couple of “in real life” keying parties here at Ancestry.com headquarters.  And, we know  that some groups and organizations are holding occasional keying parties as part of […]

It’s February!  I know.  I know.  Chalk one up for Ms. Obvious.  But, here in the northern hemisphere we are still deeply in the throes of winter.  As a matter of fact, today in Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania, Punxsutawney Phil – the groundhog – predicted six more weeks of winter. As much as I love sunny […]