What's New at Ancestry: June 2021 | The Barefoot Genealogist | Ancestry

hi everyone krista cowan here with another episode of the barefoot genealogist it is time for what's new at ancestry this is the june 2021 edition if you've never joined us for a what's new episode before we're going to cover three things those are upcoming genealogical conferences and events where you can further your education we will also talk about new uh changes made to the website updates and changes and then finally we'll end with new content new records that have been published on the site within the past month so let's go ahead and dive in we are going to start by talking about genealogical conferences and events so much of what we dealt with last year is going to continue through this year a lot of people are starting to see some relief from the pandemic but it is still in effect in some places and affecting events including genealogical events so quick run through of what's coming up and it's all still virtual which actually in some ways is a good thing because that means you have access to these things online so family search held the largest genealogical conference in the world in february about a million people uh were online for the event over the course of that weekend it was called roots tech connect and they made the videos available for that event free online for the remainder of this year so if you have not yet had a chance to go check that out you can see the url there on your screen rootstech.org you can go there and explore by topic you can go to the exhibit hall and find ancestry and just search all of the or view all of the ancestry content lots of different ways to get what you need there this past weekend the southern california genealogical society started their jamboree their genealogy jamboree and it started with a genetic genealogy conference last weekend this coming weekend will be the main genealogy conference and you can still register for that it is entirely virtual this year and genealogy jamboree.com is the url coming up in august the international association of jewish genealogical societies is holding their international conference on jewish genealogy the first through the fifth it is also entirely virtual and registration just opened within the last week or two iajs2021.org is the url there you can find information about the program and register for that event if you're interested and then the last major genealogical conference of the season will happen in october that will be the 13th through the 16th of october it's the african american historical and genealogical society's annual conference and exhibition it is also going to be entirely virtual registration has not yet opened for that event but if you want to bookmark their website or go check it out it's aahgs.org okay that's all the events now let's talk about new and updated tools and experiences on the site there have been a few this month and i just want to clarify a couple of things so first of all last month in the what's new video i talked about the new home page so this is the old home page and this is the new home page and i mistakenly told everyone that everybody had the new home page available and that wasn't quite true i misunderstood some communication and so i just want to let you know that if you do not yet have the new home page which looks like this um that it is coming so it will be rolled out eventually to everyone so sorry about that miscommunication now we're going to talk a little bit about the mobile app and i just actually um have been working on a huge presentation with some of the mobile app team that we're going to be giving to other genealogy educators and so i'm super excited about some things that i learned about the mobile app that you may not know and these things some of them are brand new so this is things that were just rolled out in the month of may and in one case it hasn't been rolled out yet to android users so i'll make sure i'm super clear about that one of the things that i love about the mobile app is the ability that it gives me to do family history on the go so it allows me to have access to my family tree wherever i am if i'm having a conversation with a family member if i'm at a family event if i want to upload photos that i've just taken on my phone directly to my tree so lots of really cool features and uses for the mobile app and it's a brilliant complement to the website now of course at home i've got double monitors and a keyboard and a mouse and the whole setup but but when i'm on the go i love having that access right there in the palm of my hand so new feature ios and android when you're on the discover tab of the mobile app you now have access to messaging right there on the discover tab so right there in that top corner same place as it is on the website you can access your messages and respond read and respond to messages or send messages another feature is that you can now save hints for later and when you come back you can pick up right where you left off so that's kind of a handy experience to just jump right in i know particularly when i have the mobile app i usually only you know i only have a few minutes i'm sitting um waiting for my nephew's basketball game to start or i'm in line at the drive-through or wherever i might be that i want to actually just do something and i only have a few minutes it's nice to be able to just jump right in or pick right back up where i left off another really cool feature on the discover tab is this new integration with newspapers.com where they will show you on occasion um headlines from this day in history which i think is really cool and super exciting to be able to put some things in context now that's this currently this part this specific feature is only available for us mobile users but we hope to be able to roll it out a little bit more broadly soon so that's a couple of those features in the mobile app then there's a new feature about the mobile app that is available to both ios and android users and that is with this widget so if you're not familiar with widgets um i use a apple device i use an iphone i'm not exactly sure how it works on android but hopefully you'll be able to follow along but typically you have your home screen and if you swipe left that's your widget screen so that's where i have things like the temperature and my calendar and the headlines for the news and that kind of information so that's called the widget screen and um android has something similar and there is now two ancestry mobile app widgets so the first one is what you're seeing here on my screen and that is the events widget and the events widget is available to ios and android users so if you don't see it you're going to want to make sure that your app is updated so just go into the the app store that you use and update that and basically what it's going to show you is on this day in history in your tree so for example my great great great grandfather was born on this day in 1836 and my great great grandfather married his i think this was wife number four um in 1930 on this day and you know that's or that's going to be in three days and then three days from now this event so it's going to give you a little bit of a preview of what's coming up in your family tree that you might want to celebrate or just recognize which i think is kind of kind of cool i do know of a woman who one of the things that she uses this for is she will actually if it's somebody's birthday or somebody's anniversary she will post on social media for her family a story about that person on their birthday so that way over the course of a year she has shared however many stories about her family members for her children and her grandchildren and i just think that's super fun oh the other sorry one more thing about the the other widget is called the discover widget and it is some previews of some of the things in your discover tab it has only been released for ios users that has not yet been released for android users that's coming within the next couple of weeks so keep an eye out for that so there are two widgets an events widget and a discover widget that allow you to kind of explore information in your tree without actually opening up the app okay the last set of updates there's two of them are related to dna and so i just want to walk through these and in particular this feature because i want to make sure that everybody understands how to use it now again this feature has not been rolled out to all users yet we are in the middle of the rollout and it's always kind of a tricky thing because i never know like do i tell you about it before it happens but then everybody's asking me what am i getting it do i tell you about it after it's happened but by then you know certain users have had it for weeks um so we're in the middle of the rollout about 50 of users have it as of today and so we're going to talk about it so it's a new feature on your ancestry dna match list now there's two primary reasons for this new feature one is a lot of users have been asking for a way to update the predicted relationships or to assign a match to a side of the tree so in my case i've tested myself in both of my parents so all of my matches automatically say mother side or father's side because i've tested both of my parents my dad we tested his mother and so he has a bunch of matches that say mother's side and then a bunch of matches that say nothing because we haven't tested his father and we can make some um assumptions or hypotheses is what we call them in dna but they're not always um he wants that label right uh my grandmother this these what you're looking at are my grandmother's results my grandmother neither of her parents tested and so you'll notice nothing here says mother side or father's side and so one of the things that this new feature will do is allow you to quickly start to sort out mother side and father's side matches in addition on every match there is a predicted relationship now i'm just showing you the first three matches on her match list which of course are my dad and his brother and his sister and parent child is always spot on um full sibling also but when you get down to that close family range in your dna match list a close family member could be a half sibling a grandparent a grandchild an aunt an uncle a niece a nephew all of those relationships share the same amount of dna and your dna is not labeled so ancestry just knows this is a close family to first cousin type of relationship and that's how we label that well people want to be able to say nope this is my aunt and nope this is my half-sister and so this new feature allows you to do that sort parents sides update the specific label of the relationship and then the other reason why this feature was introduced is because a lot of new users we've we pay attention to what you all do on the website and very very very few of you are interacting with this match list you're creating custom groups you're sorting your matches you're leaving notes you're doing all of those things and it's a really teeny percentage of you that are doing that and so we tested a few things with different customers and we asked users who weren't engaging with the match list what um would encourage them to do so and one of the things was that they didn't know what to do and so now we have a very clear call to action on every match and that call to action is do you recognize them yes or learn more and if they click learn more we walk them through a series of like educational informational things that will help them take some action if they click yes we give them some more things to do and so let me just show you on using my grandmother's match list what this looks like currently and again remember not everybody has this this has not been rolled out to all users yet but it is in the process of being rolled out so here's my dad and this is my grandmother's match list so the question is do you recognize them yes we get our little side pop out workspace that you should be familiar with now because of hints and notes and um all the other things on the site that utilize this space for tree search and my tree tags and it's the workspace and so now you can say do you know which side of doris's family steve is on well yes both sides because he's her son so i can say mother side father's side both sides are i'm not sure so i'm going to mark both sides and then it's going to say okay well based on the amount of dna that these two individuals share here is the possible relationship and in this case there's just one of them which is sun and so i'm can select that and click confirm and now what you're going to notice is instead of it saying that there is a parent-child relationship between doris and steven it's going to list him as her son specifically so and it also now says both sides right here okay so i can work my way down her match list and do that i've got her children we have to go long ways down on her match list before we find a cousin because we've got children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and all the people nephews and all sorts of people who have tested there's me um so we're going to go down here to here we go to claudia so do you recognize this person yes this person is on her mother's side and what you're gonna see here now are some options and some more options right so based on the amount of dna that claudia and doris share it can be any one of these relationships now 87 percent of the time it's going to be one of these relationships but there is a chance 12 percent of the time that it could be one of these relationships because random inheritance of dna means sometimes things get um aren't as precise right that's and that's just the nature of dna inheritance but in this case i happen to know that claudia is my grandmother's first cousin and so i can select first cousin and click confirm and now rather than having a predicted range of first to second cousin as the relationship she is marked as my grandmother's first cousin and now it says mother's side so that's kind of the basics of how this specific feature works and why it was introduced was to help people start to sort their matches and what we're discovering is that almost half of all users that have this feature are using it which is super exciting and super encouraging to us because it means that people will be able to make more discoveries it also means that new users so some of you who are watching this may be more intermediate or experienced level users but new users people who are brand new to ancestry brand new to family history just took a dna test they are interacting with this match list more and it means that they're more likely to add a family tree they're more likely to stay engaged they're more likely to respond to messages all of these things simply because we made this particular change um so that's pretty exciting now some of you the question that has already been asked so i just want to um there's two of them actually i just want to make sure we cover this before we move on one is this new question and the options replaces the green view match button until you do something with it and then the view match button is replaced is put back on that match if you don't know who the person is and you want to explore the match you can just click their name or click anywhere in this box pretty much and it will take you to that view match page so you don't have to click the green view match button and if it's not there it's you're not going to so that will take you also to the view match page the second question that i'm seeing come up um on facebook from some people who are using this feature now has to do with what if i accidentally select the wrong side of the family or the wrong relationship in order to fix it you need to go to the match page so as a matter of fact let me just take you back there really quickly so here is the match that we just updated with my dad and you'll see here he has the view match button because we updated it bradley does not because we didn't so if i go to view this match with my dad right here where it says sun both sides um you have a little pencil icon you can click on that and you can either change the relationship or go back a screen to change the assignment of which side of the family so you can edit those from the match page if you make the wrong selection so hopefully that all makes sense if you have questions that i didn't answer about this feature and i'm super excited i've already like started working on my parents match lists to do it i saved my grandma's match list so that i could show you um but super fun to start to sort these things out and to see those labels change and to see the distribution of dna and the various relationships and to start to work with the dna at that level so um if you have questions though leave them here on the youtube channel in the comments i'll pay attention to that and see if i can't answer any additional questions you might have or like always you can come over to the ancestry facebook page and we're happy to help you there okay next update is also dna related and is just a week or so old and that is the new genetic communities so on the day that we publish this video i will have done a facebook live specifically about ancestry dna communities where i walk through the details of ethnicity estimates and communities and the difference between those two and how we calculate that information so if you want to deep dive on what the difference is between ethnicity estimates and communities and how we determine those two things go over to the ancestry facebook page and there will be from june 8th there will be a facebook live where i spend about 10 minutes explaining that at the beginning of that video what i want to talk to you about here is what those new communities are so when we release new communities we typically do it in batches so you can be pulled into a genetic community at any time based on the network of matches that are being created as new people take the dna test and we now have more than 20 million people who've taken that test so super exciting to see that and that means lots of people are being pulled into existing genetic communities but also what starts to happen is new genetic communities start to form or sometimes a single community will split into two very distinct communities or more and so our science team is continually working with this massive amount of data trying to recognize those communities and what happens is we go through the process then of batching those new communities making sure we've got well-written descriptions and explanations for each of them and then we release them so if you want to keep up to date on that you can follow the ancestry blog we almost always post published a blog post when we have released new genetic communities in that blog post there is a link to the update the dna regions update page and in this case these are the new communities that we just released this past month so we took the mediterranean which before now was only two different distinct communities and we have been able to break it up into 30 unique communities so before it looked like this right if you look at this map these two regions are what were covered and now it looks like this so some people their region has expanded some people their region has pinpointed just right down to a specific region so that's the mediterranean from the balkans we had no communities before we now have 10 communities in the balkans and what you may notice is that the mediterranean and the balkans have some overlap and that's true we start to see not only distinct genetic communities but genetic communities that exist within the same location because location isn't the only thing that determines a community we can have communities based on ethnicity we can have communities based on religion there are communities based on socioeconomic groups so groups of people who intermarry and have children 150 200 years ago who then ultimately become your ancestors they can live in the same spot on a map but live in very distinct communities that intermarried with one another and so we start to see some of that overlap the more granular we get with some of these genetic communities another community and again you'll notice a little tiny bit of overlap here we went from one community that was just western asia and there are now 15 distinct communities within that particular region and then finally we updated um we now have an east africa community so before that there was no community now there is a east africa community on this page and again you get here from the blog if you go to the ancestry blog there's an article about the new communities with a link that takes you to this page you can click through and explore some more about some of these communities and there's a little video there from our science team and some additional information on this page about how communities work how communities are developed and then a whole bunch of frequently asked questions at the bottom of that page questions that i'm sure you'll have and if you ask me what you're welcome to do i will probably just link you to one of those faqs now in your ancestry dna match list your communities are just going to show up looking kind of like this so you have your ethnicity estimate solid circle percentage then if that if that ethnicity if the community that you have is a part of that ethnicity or in that same location will embed them right so this looks like a couple of english communities embedded under england as an ethnicity same thing here scotland a scottish community embedded under scotland but then make sure you scroll down to the bottom because some of you may have some of these additional communities in this case the person whose ethnicity estimate this is has early virginia african americans as a distinct community but it's at the bottom because it's in north america but she is not native north american she does have one percent of indigenous north america but that is an indigenous ethnicity not an african ethnicity so again you've got these overlapping communities sometimes based on different reasons other than just location if you have any questions post them i'll do my best to answer but super excited that we continue to roll out i think we're now over 1500 different communities that you could possibly be a part of and again you can be pulled into a community at any time or as new communities are formed we will release those usually in batches like we like i just demonstrated okay let's talk about really quickly in our last few minutes some new and updated historical record collections on the site ancestry now has more than 30 billion records on the site and in the month of may so just this past month we published more than 16 million records to the site including new records and updated records if you're new here's where you find that under the search menu you can go to the card catalog the card catalog default sort is by date added so you'll see all these databases with this new tag on it you can see if any of these records are of particular use to you in your research you can also select date updated and you'll see now some of these databases have an updated tag on it so i can come in here and i can say oh look michigan divorce records were originally published by ancestry in june of 2014 and now they've been updated in 2021 and typically what will happen is when you go to that database if you scroll down past the search box what you're going to notice is we will provide you with information about what has been updated and in this particular case we got a new year so as privacy laws um like for example in um the state of utah where i live the privacy law on birth records is a hundred years 50 uh 75 years on marriages and 50 years on deaths and so each year the state makes the next year of records public to keep up with that privacy law and so ancestry um where the government organization or state organization provides ancestry with that next year of records we publish those now sometimes it doesn't happen year after year after year sometimes it batches you know five years or ten years at a time those records are released but that's a lot of what happens when we update records is its new new records being released by the state or government organization or archive based on some of those privacy laws uh i did cover i think last month several other reasons why we update records so if you want to go jump to that point in the video you can check that out as well so there's some really great records that have come out over the course of the past month be sure to go check that list out and see if any of them are applicable to your specific research well that is all i have prepared for you today just a couple of reminders and then an invitation as we wrap up one if you want to understand more fully that dna community's ethnicity and how we figure that all out again you can find that on the ancestry facebook page june 8th there's a there will be a facebook live where i describe that in the first 10 or 15 minutes of that video and then actually we'll probably do some q a for 10 or 15 minutes uh answering some questions that people have and then another invitation so uh some of you follow me on instagram and i just published a list of five goals for the summer and one of those goals is to break through a very specific brick wall in our family tree that has been long standing for more than 40 years and i am dedicated and committed to doing that and we'll be using dna results uh to help with that so i'm gonna be documenting that on my instagram stories as i do it so every time i work on it i'll put something up on my instagram stories now ultimately when notice i didn't say if but when i break through that brick wall uh this summer um i will probably do an entire video about the whole process but if you want to follow along as i do it um i would just invite you to follow me over on instagram and keep an eye on those instagram stories for that i also share other little fun genealogical tips and resources there so you're welcome to find me there or as always here on the ancestry youtube channel well that's all i have for you today until next time i'm krista cowan have fun climbing your family tree

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 36,146

Rating: 4.9356222 out of 5

Keywords: ancestrydna, ancestry, finding your roots, family tree now, surname, family tree, ancestors, family search, dna discovery, dna tests, dna test kits, dna analysis, ancestry com, family connections, ancestry.com, family history, heritage, ethnic heritage, history, family, adoption stories, relatives, family members, Crista Cowan, The Barefoot Genealogist, Barefoot Genealogist, genealogy conferences, changes on Ancestry, What's New

Id: fBB_OgWJZBY

Length: 31min 8sec (1868 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021