The Ancestry.com family of sites and products is a collection of billions of historical records—digitized, indexed, and put online—available by subscription and through libraries around the world. The company developed their own systems for digitizing handwritten historical documents, and established relationships with national, state, and local government archives; historical societies; religious institutions; and private collectors of historical content around the world to build this collection. The records and documents, combined with their web-based online search technologies and software, let subscribers research family history, build family trees, and use the Ancestry.com sites for social networking.

Is a paid membership worthwhile? One friend of mine compared it to the premium movie channels. If you only watched one movie a month, a premium movie channel would not be a good buy. If you have a 60-inch screen and your own popcorn machine, however, because movies are your favorite thing to do, then a premium movie channel would save you money over going to the theater or buying individual pay-per-view movies. Ancestry.com is the same: If you have been seriously bitten by the genealogy bug, you will use it so much you will wonder how people ever found records without it. If you just wonder who your great-grandparents are, then don’t get your own subscription. Use it at the local library or your local Family History Center on those rare occasions when you feel like doing some research.

With 24,000 searchable databases and titles, Ancestry.com is a major online source for family history information. Since its launch in 1997, Ancestry.com has been the leading resource for family history and has worked hard at gathering diverse data with many easy-to-use tools and resources. The Ancestry.com part has the only complete online U.S. federal census collection (1790–1930), as well as the world’s largest online collection of U.S. ship passenger list records, featuring more than 100 million names (1820–1960). Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, it is a wide-ranging collection of genealogy resources. You can do some things for free, but fees apply for certain searches, some levels of disk space, and some other services.

Ancestry.com

Registering for Ancestry.com is free. That will allow you to build a family tree, connect with community members, and access all of the free content. A list of free records and a search box is at www.ancestry.com/freerecords. Just a few of the types of indexes of records you can search there include:

    • Find a Grave, 1770–1790

    • Census of the Cumberland Settlements, 1864

    • Census for Re-Organizing the Georgia Militia, 1880

    • United States Federal Census, 1881

    • Channel Islands Census, 1881

    • England Census, 1881

    • Isle of Man Census, 1881

    • Wales Census, 1891

    • New South Wales, Australia Census, 1901

    • New South Wales, Australia Census

The list includes hundreds more (see Figure 18-1).

FIGURE 18-1. Ancestry.com has many records and indexes you can search for free, as well as subscription-based databases.

To find out about all of Ancestry’s newest features, records, and more, follow the official Ancestry.com blog at http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry. Regular genealogy columns by writers such as George G. Morgan, Dick Eastman, Kip Sperry, Juliana Smith, Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, and Drew Smith are available free of charge, too. You can participate in the Ancestry.com Livestream hosted weekly with Crista Cowan at www.livestream.com/ancestry. Crista walks viewers through new topics and features, followed by a Twitter session where you can tweet more detailed questions and Crista will answer.

Using Ancestry.com

When first starting out with genealogy, it’s tempting to start researching your grandparents or further back. Start with what you know and build a tree. It can be difficult to keep all of the information straight, so the free tree feature on Ancestry.com will help you keep track of dates, stories, and relationships. Start with yourself and then move backward in time. Enter names, dates, places, and, if you have them, photographs and scanned comments. Right away, “shaking” leaves will show up on the names in your tree to help walk you through your family history (see Figure 18-2). This means that Ancestry.com has already done some searches for you, but you can do more detailed ones yourself later on, too. Talk to the oldest members of your family, and start building a family tree branch by branch.

FIGURE 18-2. “Shaking” leaves mean some records may have matched your ancestor.

Building Your Tree

Work on one generation at a time, and work backwards slowly. Look at each suggested record and thoroughly read and vet each one. If you decide one of them is right, you simply click Add, and the record (and image if available) can be attached to a specific person.

But, as great as those shaking leaves are, they won’t show you everything, so search for records from profiles of people in your family tree. Searching for data on an individual using the profile will allow you to use all of the data you already have on that person as search criteria to find more. Also, if another member has data that seems to match one of your individuals, you can connect with that person to collaborate.

Another interesting view: From an ancestor’s profile, click the green Story View button. This will pull all of the information you have on that individual into a storyboard format in a sort of executive summary. This will make sharing the family story with others simpler. A sample is in Figure 18-3.

FIGURE 18-3. Reason Powell’s story view.

Search

The main use for Ancestry.com is to find data. Sure, it has many helpful tools for analyzing, comparing, and printing out what you find, but you will mainly use Ancestry.com for searching. New in 2014 is an integrated search with sliding filter feature. You can slide the control from broad to exact for spelling, dates, and places instead of typing in ranges or doing a separate search for different spellings. This is a great time-saving tool.

The new search will also know which of the hits in the search are already attached to someone in your trees. For example, if you already have a 1940 census attached to your grandfather, search results aren’t going to bring that up again since he should only be in the 1940 census once.

With more than 13 billion historical records on Ancestry.com, it’s easy to think that they have every record. The company works with archives, courthouses, and private entities to acquire records that will have the most significance for family historians. Sometimes, records are not on Ancestry.com due to time constraints, privacy laws in certain states, or unformed partnerships with archives. To make sure the site has the collection you need, use the Ancestry.com card catalog. Hover over the Search button at the top of the page. Click Card Catalog in the drop-down menu. Then you can select location, year, record type, and more. This will help you narrow your searches to specific databases or learn if the type of record you need has been digitized yet.

Those who have the world deluxe subscription can get records on all international sites. For example, you can search England for emigration records. Again, using the card catalog to see if the records exist can be a big help. However, remember that if a record is in Italian, for example, the record will not be translated into English—only the index fields such as date and location will.

Collaborate

The Collaborate menu in Ancestry.com includes messages boards and original articles on genealogy, all of which are accessible for free. Features include the following:

    • Card Catalog is the last menu option here, but may be the most useful. Besides the records noted earlier, you can search other members’ trees for dates and names to find potential matches. If the tree is set to Public, then you can look at it and compare for common ancestors. If it is set to Private, you can send a message to the owner explaining why you think you should connect.

    • Recent Member Connect Activity shows you a list of the people in your Connect list. When these members save records, upload photos, or add persons to their trees, the activity shows up on your recent list.

    • Online Support Community is a message board about software, research techniques, and all the services offered by Ancestry.com. If you have a question or problem with Ancestry.com products, the answer is probably here.

    • Message Boards includes surnames, geography, and many other topics.

    • World Archives Project is Ancestry.com’s volunteer indexing program. It works much like FamilySearch’s volunteer indexing program.

    • Member Directory allows you to search for others in Ancestry.com’s membership who may be searching the same families as you are or who may live nearby. You fill out your Public Profile so that others can find you with this feature and with the Card Catalog.

Learning Center

Do not forget to check out the Learning Center tab on the menu bar. As mentioned, the What’s New option shows you the latest blogs and articles. First Steps has links to several good beginners’ guides, as does Family History 101. You can watch online archived webinars under one option. Another one will take you to the Ancestry.com wiki, where members and employees post answers to questions, definitions, and other useful information. Finally, of course, there’s Help.

DNA

Also, take a look at Ancestry.com DNA. Your DNA can tell you some surprising things about your heritage. You swab your cheek and mail the swab in. The resulting report from Ancestry.com DNA tells you about your ancient ancestry. Your DNA could also connect you with genetic cousins you never knew you had. Using this service, you can trace mothers with mDNA and your father’s with YDNA. The maternal line of DNA can go back 50,000 years, but these results are not as useful for beginners. The paternal report can trace 33 markers on the DNA or 45 markers. How many times the markers repeat will tell you who has the same number of repetitive sequences at the same location, meaning those who are more closely related to you.

Success Story: Smashing a Brick Wall

I smashed a brick wall recently using Ancestry.com. I have a basic subscription. There has been a story in my husband’s family for as long as anyone can remember that the name Flynt isn’t really the family surname, that it is really Damon. No one knew any more than that. Ancestry.com put an index to Maine court records online. I did a search for the great-great-grandfather Daniel Flint/Flynt. I was rewarded with “Daniel Flint (Alias).” I copied down the book and page numbers and contacted the State of Maine Archives for copies of the court records. The records showed a conviction for bigamy and included marriage records for the first marriage as Delafayette Damon to Esther Damon in Reading, Massachusetts, in 1805 and his second unlawful marriage as Daniel Flint to Lydia Anne Williams in Farmington, Maine, in 1812. He appealed the conviction on the grounds that the first marriage took place in Massachusetts and Maine didn’t have jurisdiction. He was granted a new trial, but the attorney general didn’t pursue the matter, and Daniel Flint went home to Abbot, Maine, to raise his second family, from which my husband was descended. With this information, I was able to find his ancestors through his mother back to Thomas Flint, one of the early settlers of Reading, Massachusetts, and his first wife’s family, as well as their three children. This has all been from secondary sources and not yet proved, but at least now I know where to look for proof.

–Alta Flynt

RootsWeb

How would you like a place where you can search dozens of databases of genealogical materials, look through hundreds of genealogical webpages, and subscribe to thousands of mailing lists? How about a place where you can publish your own page, upload your own data, and create your own mailing list? And all for free!

Welcome to RootsWeb (www.rootsweb.org). Once upon a time, RootsWeb was a site for a group of people working at the research center RAND who dabbled in genealogy on the side and had a club for family history. They had a little mailing list, hosted by the University of Minnesota, and a little database on the RAND server for their club. That was 20 years ago. Today, RootsWeb is the largest all-volunteer genealogy site on the Web.

RootsWeb started and continues as a volunteer effort. But the costs of servers, disk space, and connections got so high that what was once a little club of genealogy enthusiasts that worked together merged with Ancestry.com. It’s not a completely black-and-white situation; there are still plenty of transcribing projects that are free to access, such as ship’s passenger lists, census transcriptions, and so on. And Ancestry.com hosts some of the free stuff—for example, all the message boards. For the RootsWeb user, little has really changed except the format.

The mission of RootsWeb is summed up in the following statement, published on its home page: “The RootsWeb project has two missions: To make large volumes of data available to the online genealogical community at minimal cost. To provide support services to online genealogical activities, such as Usenet newsgroup moderation, mailing list maintenance, surname list generation, and so forth.”

A quick guided tour of RootsWeb only scratches the surface of all the helpful and informative services available on this site. The following story gives you an idea of the unique possibilities RootsWeb offers.

Success Story: RootsWeb Leads to a Reunion

About three years ago, I started searching for my Powell ancestors on my father’s side, but about the only thing I knew how to do was search the surname and message boards. One night, after having done nothing in about two months, I decided to get online and read the [RootsWeb] surname message boards. On a whim, I went into the Hubbard message boards on my mother’s side.

The first message I read was about someone searching for descendants of my grandmother’s parents. When my grandmother was about three or four, her mother passed away and she went to live with an aunt and uncle. Eventually, my grandmother lost contact with her brothers. She did see her oldest brother once when she was about 15, but after that she never saw or heard from him again. That night, I found him—a person my grandmother had not seen in over 70 years. We flew to Washington state and met all kinds of new cousins, aunts, and uncles. Over the next two years, my grandmother spoke with her brother many times. Unfortunately, he passed away soon after, but she did see him twice and was able to speak with him on numerous occasions.

We figured out that the message I responded to had been posted for about a minute before I discovered it. The surname message boards are a wonderful tool in searching for the ancestors and relatives you never knew you had, or those you had but didn’t know who they were.

—Jennifer Powell Lyons

Digging in RootsWeb

RootsWeb has more genealogical information than you can shake a stick at. Some of this is secondary source information, such as the genealogy databases (GEDCOMs) members have submitted. Some of this information is close to primary source information, though still derivative—for example, transcripts of wills, deeds, census forms, and vital records, some with citations of where exactly the physical record can be found. Some of it is primary information (for example, Ancestry.com’s census images) and you have to pay a subscription fee to Ancestry.com to access it.

At the top of all RootsWeb pages, you’ll see a navigation bar with these categories: Home, Searches, Family Trees, Mailing Lists, Message Boards, Web Sites, Passwords, and Help (see Figure 18-4). Home, Passwords, and Help are self-explanatory.

FIGURE 18-4. All RootsWeb pages have a navigation bar at the top.

When you look at the RootsWeb home page in your browser, you’ll find two search templates to input a surname, first name, or any keywords. The search will look in all the RootsWeb pages or Ancestry.com databases and show you the results. It’s a great way to get started on your genealogy!

Finding information on RootsWeb can be that simple. However, you can use many different tools on the site to get more targeted results.

Getting Started at RootsWeb

On the Home page index is a section called “Getting Started.” The sections there—Getting Started at RootsWeb, Ancestry Tour, RootsWeb’s Guide To Tracing Family Trees, RootsWeb Review Archives, Subscribe, and What’s New—will give the beginner a good grounding in RootsWeb. Getting Started At RootsWeb is a short page on how to share, communicate, research, and volunteer with the site. Ancestry Tour is a multimedia overview of what the commercial side offers. RootsWeb’s Guide To Tracing Family Trees is really a collection of guides sorted by general genealogy, sources, and countries. What’s New lists the newest additions to the pages and databases on the volunteer side, and subscribing to RootsWeb Review will bring the same information to your e-mail inbox.

Available Files and Databases

ROOTS-L has tons of files and databases, which you can get access to by e-mailing the appropriate commands to the list server that runs ROOTS-L. You can search the ROOTS-L library for everything from a fabulous collection devoted to obtaining vital records, to useful tips for beginners, to book lists from the Library of Congress, and more. Some of the available files include:

    • Surname Helper (http://surhelp.rootsweb.com) Looks at the RootsWeb message boards and personal websites.

    • U.S. Town/County Database (http://resources.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/townco.cgi) Looks for locations. It’s a sort of online gazetteer.

    • The WorldConnect Project (http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com) Searches GEDCOMs of family trees submitted by RootsWeb members.

    • The USGenWeb Archives Search (http://usgenweb.org) Looks for pages posted across the United States in the GenWeb Project.

    • WorldGenWeb (http://worldgenweb.org) Searches for genealogy resources in nations outside the United States.

    • RootsWeb Surname List The RootsWeb Surname List (RSL), located at http://rsl.rootsweb.com, is a registry of who is searching for whom and in what times and places. The listings include contact information for each entry. When you find someone looking for the same name, in the same area, and in about the same time period, you might be able to help each other. That’s the intent of the list. You don’t have to pay to submit your own data or to search for data. To search the list, you can use the form on the search page or go to the page directly. On the RSL page, type the surname you want to search for. You can narrow your search by including a location where you think the person you are looking for lives or lived, using the abbreviations you’ll find in the link below the location box. Use the options to choose whether you want to search by surname (names spelled exactly as you’ve typed them) or by Soundex or Metaphone (names that sound like the one you’ve typed but spelled differently). In future attempts, you can limit the search to new submissions within the last week, month, or two months. The list is updated once a month. The Migration field shows you the path the family took. SC>GA, for example, shows migration from South Carolina to Georgia.

    • WorldConnect Project The WorldConnect Project is one of several GEDCOMs discussed in Chapter 11. When searching it from the RootsWeb home page, you can only input first and last names. The results page has another input form at the bottom, enabling you to fine-tune the search by adding places and dates. If you go to the WorldConnect page at http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com, you can find links to tips and hints for using the site. Remember, all the data here is uploaded by volunteers, so errors might exist!

    • Social Security Death Index The Social Security Death Index (SSDI), located at http://ssdi.rootsweb.com, searches the federal records of deaths. Anyone who died before Social Security began in the 1930s won’t be in this database. When searching from the RootsWeb home page, all you can input is the first and last name, but the results page will let you link to the Advanced Search page, where you can narrow the search by location and date. This is an excellent tool for researching twentieth-century ancestors.

    • GenSeeker GenSeeker looks for your search terms on the thousands of personal genealogy webpages at RootsWeb, plus any other registered documents, such as records transcriptions. You can also perform Boolean searches.

Other Search Engines

RootsWeb has several other ways for you to search both the site and the Web at large. Search Thingy looks at all the databases and text files, and MetaSearch looks for names across RootsWeb. The Surnames search index, United States Counties/States index, and the Countries index all search different subsets of RootsWeb information. These searches can be helpful in your research, but they assume you’re a rank beginner with no more than a name or a place to launch your inquiries. Perhaps you know for sure that you’re looking for a land record in Alabama or a cemetery in Iowa. RootsWeb has several searchable resources for items such as these. All these are worth looking at, and all can be accessed from http://searches.rootsweb.ancestry.com/.

Message Boards and Mailing Lists

Among the best resources on RootsWeb are the mailing lists and message boards, now hosted on Ancestry.com. A message board is a place where messages are read, sent, and answered on the Web, using a browser. A mailing list is where messages are e-mailed to and from the members. A mail client is used to read them.

Click the bottom of any message board’s page to read the frequently asked questions (FAQs), request a new board, read the rules, or get help. The mailing lists, located at http://lists.rootsweb.com, cover many topics, such as the RootsWeb newsletters, described later in this chapter. Lists exist for specific surnames; every state in the United States; other countries (from Aruba to Zimbabwe); and topics such as adoption, medical genealogy, prisons, and heraldry. From the Mailing Lists page, you can click a link to each one, and you’ll get instructions on how to use the list, including subscribing, unsubscribing, sticking to the topic, and so on.

Besides ROOTS-L, which is the grandparent of genealogy mailing lists on the Internet, RootsWeb hosts literally thousands of mailing lists. The index, located at www.rootsweb.com/~maillist, has thousands of lists you can join, along with instructions explaining how to subscribe.

A good rule of thumb: Be choosy in joining lists! Take on only a few at a time. Read the lists for a while, sign off if they don’t prove useful, and then try some others. Some lists are extremely active—sometimes overwhelmingly so. One RootsWeb user who signed up for every possible mailing list for the United Kingdom had 9,000 e-mails in his inbox within 24 hours! Be careful what you wish for…

And remember, some lists are archived, so you needn’t subscribe to see if that list is talking about subjects of interest to you. Just search the archive for your keywords, and save the important messages. You might even want to start a mailing list of your own someday, which contributors can do. You can learn more about what’s required of a list owner by going to the Help page and clicking the Request A Mailing List link or by going to http://resources.rootsweb.com/adopt.

Newsletters

A newsletter, like a mailing list, comes straight to your e-mail inbox. Unlike the lists discussed previously, however, they are not for discussion; the communication is one-to-many. Like a print magazine, a newsletter will have news, notes, stories, and the occasional (text) advertisement. RootsWeb has several e-mail newsletters, all of which are worth reading. Here are some descriptions of them.

RootsWeb-Sponsored Pages

Books We Own (http://rootsweb.ancestry.com/~bwo) is a list of resources owned and accessed by volunteers who are willing to look up genealogical information and then e-mail or snail mail it to others who request it. It works like a worldwide research library, where your shelf of genealogy books is one branch and you’re one librarian of thousands. This is a volunteer service, and participants might ask for reimbursement of copies and postage if information is provided via snail mail. The project began in 1996 as a way for members of the ROOTS-L mailing list to share their resources with one another, and now some 1,500 people are involved.

FreeBMD (http://freebmd.org.uk) stands for Free Births, Marriages, and Deaths. The FreeBMD Project’s objective is to provide free Internet access to the Civil Registration index information for England and Wales. The Civil Registration system for recording births, marriages, and deaths in England and Wales has been in place since 1837. This is one of the most significant single resources for genealogical research back to Victorian times.

Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild (http://immigrantships.net) is a group of volunteers dedicated to making the search for our ancestors’ immigration easier. The aim is to make as many ships’ passenger lists as possible available online—and not just for U.S. ports. There are databases for Australia, Canada, Irish passengers to Argentina, and more. This group would also be happy to have your help!

State Resource Pages (http://rootsweb.ancestry.com/roots-l/usa.html) is one of the main areas of RootsWeb. It offers a wealth of information to those researching in the United States.

Freepages are genealogy pages by volunteers. These pages must fit the RootsWeb mission; cannot contain copyrighted, commercial, or multimedia material; and cannot redirect to another site. If you meet these and all the other rules stated on http://accounts.rootsweb.ancestry.com, you can have free web space at RootsWeb. The freepages include sites of major RootsWeb projects, such as USGenWeb and WorldGenWeb, as well as genealogical or historical organizations.

You can find kids’ pages, lessons and help pages, memorials, and timelines among these pages. If you already have a genealogy-related website and want it linked from RootsWeb, you can register it as well.

The Help Desk

The Help Desk (http://helpdesk.rootsweb.com/) maintains a page to help you find a FAQ file about RootsWeb and its services. If you have a question or problem, check here first. If you can’t find an answer here, you can follow the links from this site to the message board, where you can post a question for the Help Desk team to answer.

This quick tour is just enough to whet your appetite, but isn’t even half of what’s there. Spend some time getting to know RootsWeb.

Wrapping Up

    • Ancestry.com and RootsWeb have digitized, transcribed, and abstracted records for you to search, as well as message boards and other interactive services.

    • Many Ancestry.com articles and helpful files are free, but the bulk of the data is only available to paying members.

    • RootsWeb is the oldest gathering of volunteer pages, data, and programs in the world of online genealogy.