Happy New Year


I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and are off and running into the New Year.  Before we jump into all the exciting things we have planned for 2011, I’d like to take a few minutes and look back at some highlights from 2010.  It really was an inspiring year!

For those of you who just joined us this year, you may not know that the Ancestry World Archives Project started in beta in mid-2008 and wasn’t formally launched until Fall of that year.  For a community that is really only a couple of years old, you all are doing amazing things.

Fun Stats

  • There were 31,761 new contributors who joined us in 2010 bringing our grand total to 64,861.
  • Our community keyed and arbitrated 28,226,544 records in 2010 which resulted in 14,912,333 records indexed and ready for searching.
  • We have now released a grand total of 49 completed projects.  There are an additional 33 that our community has finished keying and are now in final processing before going live.
  • We are currently working on 36 active projects.

World Record Challenge:  Holiday 2010 Edition
We just finished a two month holiday challenge in which $5000 was up for grabs.  The top five contributors will select a genealogical or historical organization of their choice.  Ancestry.com will donate money to that organization in their name.  We hope those organizations will then use those funds to continue the great work of record preservation and access that we are all so passionate about.  The winners are:

  1. 127,813 – Anne from Derbyshire
  2. 104,860 – Karen from Nottinghamshire
  3. 101,771 – Jeanette from Michigan
  4. 63,930 – Ann from Texas
  5. 62,583 – Elisabeth from Yorkshire

Yep – 2010 was a great year.  Thanks to each of you and your generous contribution of time and skill there are now over 20 million records live on Ancestry.com that can be searched for free by anyone.  One keystroke at a time we are saving the records of the world.

Here’s to an even better 2011.  Happy New Year to you all.

Until Next Time – Happy Keying!

Information and Links

Join the fray by commenting, tracking what others have to say, or linking to it from your blog.

Information
January 5th, 2011
16 Responses
Feeds and Links
Comment Feed
From This Author
Del.icio.us
Digg
Technorati
Categories and Tags
Milestones
WorldRecordChallenge

Other Posts

Write a Comment

Take a moment to comment and tell us what you think. Some basic HTML is allowed for formatting.

Reader Comments

Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Joni
Posted on:
January 5, 2011 at 1:56 pm

Thank you, Ancestry, for bringing so many genealogists and family historians together as a ‘community’ to work on preserving and indexing records many of us never knew existed! Happy New Year!

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
aileen williams
Posted on:
January 5, 2011 at 2:44 pm

Ancestry World Project because it allows me to “go back to work” and gives me an interest as a volunteer keyer. I would like to give Ancestry World Project keyers “A happy New Year 2011.

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Sue
Posted on:
January 5, 2011 at 6:42 pm

Cheers! I just found my ggrandfather’s PA Nat record, my passion keying project (somebody else already keyed it, but I couldn’t track it down until today). His whole family, with birth dates for both parents and 7 children, including my grandfather, is now available so I can add more information to ancestors I never thought I could locate. Back to work, to finish up the 20000 images, for the PA Nat’s–yay! This is a great project–thank you for this fabulous opportunity to make a real difference in world-wide history.

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
BalazsR
Posted on:
January 6, 2011 at 10:19 am

The Michigan Passenger and Crew list database, which has just went live, is not freely accessible to active contributors.

Comment Number:
5
Written by:
Elisabeth
Posted on:
January 7, 2011 at 2:40 am

Type your comment here.

Comment Number:
6
Written by:
Elisabeth
Posted on:
January 7, 2011 at 2:50 am

The Society I have selected to receive my prize is the:
Shetland Family History Society.
she Shetland Islands are a small group of Islands between the North-West of Scotland and Norway. It has only about 20.000 inhabitants. But most of them have family members who emigrated between 1850 and 1950 in all corners of the world., many to Australia and New Zealand. The Family History Society is a Charity and relies on membership fees, which are not very high. The Society does a wonderful job finding and preserving family history. There is a website free to all with many family trees of Shetlanders freely available to all. Interesting for all with roots in Shetland.
http://www.bayanne.info/Shetland/family group

Comment Number:
7
Written by:
Geneva Lawrence
Posted on:
January 10, 2011 at 6:31 am

I was born in Essex England and have noticed that many of the church records are not online. They can be ordered, but the price seems very expensive. Do you have any plans to put them up for keying?

Comment Number:
8
Written by:
John McGuigan
Posted on:
January 11, 2011 at 10:02 pm

I recently submitted the following comment directly to ancestry.com support.
I am disappointed with the results of what I have been keying. I’ve been working on the PA US Naturalization Index. Everything I key has to do with an index for either the Declaration of Intent or the Request for Naturalization forms. Yet, when I use ancestry.com to look for these for some of my ancestors I get a different index pointing to images related to immigration, or some other cover page image. What’s going on? It appears I’m wasting my time with this.
I received this reply………
John,

You aren’t going to get these results in your search until the entire project has been keyed, reviewed, and assembled into the Ancestry.com search. If you have additional questions or feedback please reply. We appreciate your contributions to the World Archives Project.
Apparently Sue (January 5, 2011 at 6:42 pm) was able to access the actual form images. Now I’m more disappointed.