Ancestry's Newspaper Obits & Marriages + One World Tree & Family Data Collection with Crista Cowan

i'm super excited to tell you that i was able to get many of our questions answered from ancestry's own christa cowan we talked about so many things that i had to break this up into a few episodes so you'll see more of her coming up in the next few weeks now in this episode we're talking about newspapers.com and the exciting new indexing that they're doing over there as well as the family data collection and the one world tree now if you're wondering what the one world tree and the family data collection is well i wanted to get some more information about that too so that's one of the reasons why i asked so well first let me introduce myself my name is connie knox i am a lifelong genealogist here to help you go further faster and factually with your family history research now this is a footnotes episode and i like to call them footnotes because it's in the footnotes where the real sources are and today's real source is christa cowan from ancestry she is another lifelong genealogist and has been working at ancestry since about 2004 you may know her as the barefoot genealogist hosting her own videos on youtube and social media here she is krista cowan chris is back in the house we're back uh i have here well welcome back i have a ton of questions on a variety of subjects that we've just been piling up and so i can't wait to um to jump into it so you ready yeah for sure let's go this is kind of like our rapid fire but not rapid fire like we did it okay so now i know that uh ancestry recently uh put out a a big notice about uh the marriage records and previously the obituary indexing that was going on on the ancestry.com flat excuse me the platform tell us what's going on there tell us tell us about that because i'm i'm excited about it but i want them to hear from you yeah for sure so uh some people may know that ancestry also owns a website called newspapers.com they have digitized more than 600 million pages of newspapers and just continue to add to that collection both historic newspapers that they're able to acquire and then also new newspapers as um as they become available through arrangements with the publishers that own those papers and one of the challenges for genealogists on ancestry which is where our trees live and where we do most of our searching is that they either didn't know those newspapers existed or they didn't know how to search them and integrate that information with their tree on ancestry so ancestry has employed artificial intelligence to scan all 600 million plus of those newspaper pages and we have created searchable indexes of the obituaries and then now this new collection of marriages so the indexes that allow you to search those newspapers are now available on ancestry and then if you want to view the images of those newspapers you can click through over to newspapers.com so okay so this is really cool because this is very powerful i think i've already been playing in there um so i i'm familiar with it but i just to be clear what all is being extracted so for example let's say a marriage announcement we've got the bride and the groom and maybe some other family members that are um you know talked about in the article is all of that information being extracted in the index yeah so the indexes including any immediate family relationships that we can uh extract through that artificial intelligence so if it says you know the father or the parents of the bride are and then it lists their names we can we've trained a computer to read that and extract that information and then we also will include information like occupations of the bride and groom or education a lot of times marriage announcements will list where they graduated from high school if they're currently enrolled in college any information about um hometowns like any any biographical information that we can train a computer to extract from those we've done it and so sometimes you'll just see a little little index with just the bride and the groom and the marriage date in place and sometimes you'll see an index entry that includes fields and fields and fields of information well that is really cool i did not know that about some of the location information i'm assuming that is the same kind of uh technology for the obituary indexes it is it's actually a technology that we developed back when we were indexing uh city directories and then we improved or enhanced that when we did our yearbook collection several years ago and then we applied it to the newspapers obituaries collection that we launched last year this year it's the newspaper marriages collection and so if you start thinking about newspapers you can imagine what other bits of information might be in there that we might be able to apply the same technology to in the coming years oh the wheels are turning you know i'm sitting there thinking oh what else can we pull out of there very cool that is that is some really cool stuff now let me ask you though can anybody with a basic subscription to newspapers.com access these records so the index to both the obituaries and the marriages is available on ancestry and you can access the index with whatever level of subscription you have so for example what we've just released is the us newspapers marriages index so if you have a u.s or world subscription to ancestry you'll have access to that index if you want to click through to view the image you do have to have a subscription to newspapers.com there are two levels of subscription there so the first one is a basic subscription and those are typically going to be the newspapers that are pre-1923 so they are no longer in copyright most of the newspapers after 1923 are still in copyright and so extra um royalties are due to the publishers and so those are part of what we call our publishers extra subscription um and that's done based on views and stuff and so you have to have a subscription um an additional subscription to newspapers to access those post 1923 newspapers well that alone is just like so huge i mean i'll tell you what i have solved more puzzles in newspapers than anything um so kudos to you guys so i ran across this myself as i was doing some research and actually recording another episode and i ran across two things uh the first one being the family data collection now what exactly is that well there's actually four databases so we have just one that's just called i believe the family data collection then we also have one that is births one that's marriages and one that is deaths and like all databases on ancestry whenever you find a record if you just kind of scroll down on the page you'll see the source information usually with a little learn more link which takes you to the database page that then usually has a more full database description so i always encourage people no matter what database you're looking at on ancestry if it's the first time you've ever used that set of records make make it a habit to to read that database description in the case of the family records collection they are a series of records from professional genealogists that ancestry purchased when we were very first a company and trying to acquire records imagine this brand you know the internet was brand new it was 1997 1998 and we were a brand new company now imagine walking into an archive and saying we'd like to take your precious records that you preserved for hundreds of years and digitize them and put them online and the response was usually something like you want to do what with what and put it where and who are you and so in those early years ancestry acquired records from whomever was willing to sell us copies or license copies to us that family records collection like i said is just a series of of um records from professional genealogists who had indexed the names that they had researched over 40 50 years of their career um and made those and we made those searchable the challenge with that particular collection is those genealogists are no longer living or no longer in business and so there's no way to get back to the original source of what they provided but it is a good set of clues yeah so that that uh it was exactly what i kind of where i was going with that was because you can't really drill into it and um and so it's kind of like oh all right so we think there's some information here but we don't really know where the original source came from and just like the family trees that are the public trees that are out there you know we kind of have to see if we can get back to the original sources and sadly in that collection it's providing clues but we can't get back to the original source so thank you for the answer on that one yep all right let's talk about the one world tree that's another source that's listed at ancestry uh is that the same same thing no one world tree is a little bit different and actually um that particular database no longer exists so you may see it used as a source on some people's trees because that's where the original information came from but um one world tree was an attempt by ancestry wow it was it was shortly after i started working at ancestry so it's probably been 15 or 16 years ago ancestry has not always had trees online that was kind of a a new thing back in you know the early 2000s we invited people to put their trees online it is not our tree experience like you think of it now with that's so dynamic um and then ancestry took all those trees that had been uploaded and we made an attempt to to connect all that information right and create a world tree and one world tree was supposed to be an index that allowed you to search all of those trees you know if you've got a samuel mulliner and 93 trees on ancestry we wanted to be able to give you one entry for it one search result that you could then use to go and find those other trees and it had some inherent problems and it was back in the day when this technology was still pretty new and like they were static trees it wasn't the dynamic trees that we have now and so if people found errors or made changes those weren't always reflected so it was a it was an attempt to create a search engine that turned into an indexed database that uh eventually offline that's another one we can't dig into correct correct okay i just just checking because you know i've tripped across it so many times especially in some of my older lines uh-huh that i haven't touched in a decade and you said early 2000 i'm thinking that wasn't that long ago but if you think about the evolution of ancestry and um the trees that we have now are just fabulous i love them hey krista thank you so much for the time i will leave links to other videos with krista in them on the screen for you now so you can binge watch some more all right it's time for you to go find your ancestors so until next time keep on climbing your family tree

Channel: Genealogy TV

Views: 6,103

Rating: 4.9582248 out of 5

Keywords: Obituaries, old newspapers, newspapers online, search newspaper archives, marriage announcements in newspapers, newspaper archives, marriage announcements, obituaries search, newspaper obituaries, old obituary search free, marriage records, marriage license search, historical marriage records, what is the Family Data Collection?, what is the One World Tree?, youtube, ancestry, familysearch, Myheritage, family tree, findmypast, genealogy, family history, genealogy research, #genealogy

Id: FIyO5UIh2tY

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020