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

hi everyone krista cowan here with another episode of the barefoot genealogist this is a what's new at ancestry for march 2021. if you've never joined us for a what's new episode before we just break it down into three main categories first we talk about genealogical conferences and events happening around the genealogy community second we talk about new products or features at ancestry and third we talk about new record collections available for you to research in so let's dive in okay we're going to start by talking about genealogical conferences and of course the big news is roots tech so the big kickoff for roots tech was the last weekend of february they had more than a million people participate in the live event but the great news coming out of roots tech this year is that it is that it is fully free it is fully virtual and for the first time ever all 1500 plus presentations are going to be available at rootstech.org for the remainder of the year so if you didn't get a chance to watch roots tech at all or if you were only able to catch some of the presentations during the actual live conference event all of those recordings are now available at rootstech.org for free of course you're going to want to click on the expo hall in the top right corner of that website and go to ancestry you'll find the ancestry virtual exhibit hall booth and there you can find all of the presentations from ancestry including our brand new educational series genealogy in a minute starring yours truly and if you scroll down past that you'll see about 20 to 30 additional classes from various ancestry employees teaching you how to do all sorts of things on the website and in family history so a big thank you to family search for making roots tech available fully free for fully virtual and for the remainder of the year that's super exciting next up we have the national genealogical societies annual conference the dates this year are the 17th through the 21st of may you can register for the conference now at conference.ngsgenealogy.org so go check that out they've got a great lineup of speakers here's kind of what i'm starting to see happen in the genealogy community which is roots tech has a whole bunch of really great beginner content foundational family history content from all over the world the national genealogical society has a little bit more advanced uh content so if you want to dive deeper into specific research methodologies if you want to learn more about becoming an accredited genealogist or a certified genealogist if you want to see case studies ngs is a great conference for accessing that kind of education so i encourage you to sign up for that and then of course the third big event coming up from the 4th through the 12th of june is the southern california genealogical society's genealogy jamboree it is also going to be entirely virtual this year registration is now open at genealogy jamboree.com and one of the great things about jamboree is that they have an entire segment of tracks in their program dedicated to using dna for family history discoveries so lots of really great deep dna education and case studies and opportunities to learn from some of the best experts in the fields who are using dna on a daily basis to add to the body of evidence for their family history research so really great opportunity for education there as well now it is time for our new and updated uh tools and experiences on ancestry so um this is super exciting because we've got lots that's been going on one thing that we've been doing for a year now is promoting our ancestryk12.com program so we've had this program around for years and years but last march when things kind of changed in the world a little bit we started promoting the availability of this for both teachers and parents as a way to integrate family history into education but also as a way to just use the tools on ancestry like newspapers.com or census records or draft cards to teach specific things in the classroom wherever that classroom may be to educate to educate your children about that time in history or that portion of how to do research lots of really great skills so there are lots of resources available there including a grant that teachers can apply for but specifically i want you to pay attention if you're a parent or if you are an educator or work with educators to the lesson plan so ancestry has some lesson plans that have been created there by teachers for teachers and those are a fantastic resource another new thing you may have noticed on the site is what we're calling our guided one of our guided discovery tools so whenever you're missing a piece of information in your timeline about a person if we have hints for that um hints that give you information that answered that specific research question like when did this person die uh we'll show you this little blue box if you don't like it you can just click out of it but if you want to follow that trail you can find hints so sometimes it'll say the word hints and sometimes it'll say the word search and what it's doing is it is looking specifically for that piece of information so here's why we're introducing some different tools like this around the site one of the things that happens is sometimes people come to the site and they see the hints and that's all they follow or they don't know that they can do a search from their tree or that they can craft individual searches so we're just trying to provide new users and some of you who haven't been on the site for a long time just a little bit of guided discovery through that process one of the things that some of the more intermediate users do is that we tend not to always think about um think in terms of research questions right that's kind of an advanced genealogy user process and we want to start training some of you into that concept which is what is it that i'm trying to discover like what is my research question and in this case my research question might be when and where did susan die and so so putting it in that context is going to help you start thinking that way which ultimately is going to make you a better researcher and it's going to make sure that you're locating the records that you want to locate and gathering the information you want to gather and discovering the stories you want to discover so that you can make sure you're climbing your family tree and not someone else's okay so that is some of our guided discovery tools we've made some updates in ancestry dna as well so you may have noticed um within the last couple of months we released a 349 new ancestry dna communities so there are now i'm trying to think no more than i had to look at my screen that's how that's how much i keep forgetting these numbers um there are now more than 1400 total regions available so let me just give you a quick explanation and we'll look at my own dna results to walk you through this so that you understand when we say ancestry dna communities what it is exactly that we mean so here are my dna results we're going to look at my i think we're going to look at my dna results um we're gonna look at my dna story i'm running a whole bunch of things on the internet right now um so when you take a dna test we provide you with an ethnicity estimate so an ethnicity estimate is any of those numbers here that have a percentage and those percentages are going to be from us comparing your dna to a reference panel of people from regions around the world in addition to that you may see um like under ireland if i had a community in ireland it would be listed right under ireland but um because my communities are here in the united states and i am not an indigenous american they're listed under additional communities so you can have communities nested up here under your ethnicity estimates or down at the bottom under additional communities now i only have a short list here some of you have long lists you might need to scroll down to see some of those additional communities you know it's a community because a it won't have a percentage next to it and b it will have a dotted line around the little colored circle here's the difference between the two the ethnicity estimate we're comparing you to a reference panel and it's looking at where your dna may have been in the world 500 to a thousand years ago for most of us that's a little outside of the realm of genealogical discoverability if we're talking about the entirety of our family tree the genetic communities are created these communities are created by looking at all of the other people that you match and the people that they match and what we start to see emerge in this data are clusters of matches and we can determine these people are a community of people because they all inherited dna from a common group of people who lived in a specific area within the last 200 years and so we can provide you with the information about these communities and and it's based on your dna matches now here's what you need to know about how this information is delivered that ethnicity estimate it gets updated every year or so as our reference panel grows as the algorithms improve we're able to be more precise and so you might see some of those percentages shift a little bit you might see some new regions pop up as we add new regions but we add new communities more regularly than that usually so this latest release we added more than 300 communities it's one of the largest releases of communities that we've done and so that's just going to pop up on your list if you're part of that community the other time you might see a change in your communities is if all of a sudden you have enough matches that have pulled you in to be a part of an existing community so those communities can update or show up on your list pretty much at any time so you'll want to make sure you check your dna story once in a while or just watch the ancestry blog and we can we put out um a blog post whenever we update the communities as a matter of fact if you want to read more about the communities that we just released you can go to blogs that's blogs plural blogs.ancestry.com and you can um read more about that okay let's uh move on from there another new experience on the site and this is so fun for me even though i'm not a new user um i've used census records for years i have done detailed classes on the 1940 census specifically but i love this because beginners don't know what they don't know so they see a census record and and they you that are new see a census record and you get so excited and you should because there's really cool information on there but one of the things that we discovered and talking to a lot of you is that you didn't even know how cool all the information was on there because there were things you just didn't understand what you were looking at and even for some of you who are more intermediate users who've maybe used the site for a while who've worked with census records for a while sometimes we get in this habit of just you know finding and attaching records and finding and attaching records particularly when they're delivered to us as hints so one of the things that this new feature does is it actually will give you a tour through a census record when you find it so it's called the 1940 census tour and you can if you go into the experience you don't have to do it every time if you don't want to you can just keep working with census records like you always have so let me just show you uh the census tour for my great grandfather so i found him here in the census this is the record page right so it's the page that comes before you actually click through to view the image when you've come from some search results or from a hint and it's got all the information we indexed the family down here at the bottom you're going to see this new blue box guided discovery right this new blue box here at the top and if you click start tour it's going to open that image and it's going to walk you through the image explaining what the different things on the image mean so we can click start tour and first it's going to tell me the street address so the house number and then the street name of where they lived i can actually click through and view where that is it's going to tell me a little bit about the city where they lived and what the population was in this case it's going to explain that he owned his home what the value of that home was what it would be today it's going to explain who who in the household gave the information so in this case you've got this little x here in a circle it's the only census that contains the information about who spoke to the census taker to give them the information about the household which is what that means now one thing the census tour doesn't include is what this little a b means in this case it means absent so the census taker was supposed to ask who was living in this household on census day and in this case um he was not there he was traveling for business so he wasn't in the house then it's going to talk about the ages of the people and the ages you know of everyone in the household relative to everyone else it's going to show you the education information it's going to show you the birthplaces and then you're done okay so you can come back into this at any time and you can do it for anybody in the 1940 census just look for that little blue box and click start tour i think it's super handy um sometimes we just like i said sometimes we just get so used to finding and saving records that we don't really take the time to fully digest them now if you've spent any time with me you know i transcribe all of my records so basically what they've done is they've this tour has taken these sentences of information kind of like i transcribe them into my notes um for every record so that i capture all of that information so i extract all the juicy goodness if you want to learn more about my process for doing that i have a video called ancestry online trees notes versus comments and i walk through how i um create that transcription in my notes and how it informs my research process okay the next thing that we're going to talk about are the new records on ancestry so new and updated uh records in our historical record collection there were more than 14 million records added to the site in january and february of 2021 so in the last 60 days or so and if you've never looked at what's new on ancestry before or watched one of these videos before let me just explain that when you're on ancestry you can click on search and under the search menu you're going to find the card catalog it's my favorite thing on the whole website and it is where you can see what has been added or updated on the site the default sort for that list is date added but if you just click the little sort feature in the top right you can switch it to date updated and you'll see not just the new things but the updated things as well now one of the questions that i get asked a lot and i want to make sure this is super clear is what does it mean when ancestry updates a database well there's a lot of different reasons databases get updated sometimes they just get updated because some of you have given us feedback about some sets of images in the record that aren't totally clear or a bunch of records that had the wrong county that they were assigned to so we do updates in the case of fixes right to some of those databases based on your feedback more often however those updates are done because we're adding records to the specific database and records can be added for a lot of different reasons sometimes they're added because we have other sources that we have collected information from sometimes they're added because we have um new counties that are being added so we have a an example of that and then sometimes they're added because additional years become available so that's how we how we determine the uh the updates for those particular records okay i'm gonna show you those i thought i had a link here to click through and it looks like i don't so we're just gonna do this really quickly i'm going to come over here to ancestry we're going to go into the card catalog and we're going to take a look at a few of these new databases for our last couple of minutes together so let's come down here to the card catalog you're going to see ancestry currently has 32 930 databases here's where i can sort it by date updated you're going to be looking for this little green tag over here that will tell you if the database was updated or if it is a new database let me make this a little bigger for your screen okay that looks good okay so as you scroll down this list what you can do is you can hover over any of these sets of records just move your mouse over it and you'll get a little pop-up that tells you um when this database was originally published and when this database was updated so one of the sets of records that were updated this past month it's kind of a big deal is the find a grave indexes so if you're familiar with find a grave ancestry um owns another website it's totally free it's very community driven we purchased the website after it already had a very well established community the whole purpose of the website is to record information about where people are buried and so volunteers go around taking photos of tombstones and upload those photos and create these memorial pages for individuals uh connected to the cemetery where they're buried ancestry indexes that information then so we make like we create an index out of it and we publish those indexes on ancestry so that you know that a find a grave entry exists and the thing is is that a new people are being buried all the time right so it's growing in that way but also because it's completely volunteer sometimes new cemeteries are being photographed and that information is being uploaded and pages created sometimes somebody went through a cemetery and only got to half of it and so then somebody else comes and they do the other half sometimes people put in a request and they say i think my great-grandfather's buried here and it's across the country and i don't know how to get there uh so could somebody go there and take a photo for me and somebody will go and take a photo of just the one tombstone in the cemetery and then somebody else will come along and want another tombstone in the cemetery and so on and so sometimes it just takes a while before the entire cemetery has been photographed and inventoried so new records constantly being added to find a grave ancestry has to update the indexes to those on a regular basis so the fastest way to find that other than just scrolling through this list is i can come over here and i can type in find a grave and i'm going to see that there are 11 find a grave databases you'll see they are broken out by country okay and you'll see how many total records are in each of those databases so that and you'll notice every one of them has an updated tag because they were all updated within this past month with new information so that's one of the ways to keep up with information so if you've searched find a grade the find to grave indexes before maybe you can search them again for family members to see if new information has been added and then just because it's march um these are not new databases but i did want to highlight for just a minute before we close out um that uh the ireland databases that ancestry has on ancestry are fantastic so there are 170 of them individual databases that contain records from ireland or northern ireland you can again sort this cat collection this set of databases by collection title which is alphabetical or i sometimes like to just sort the list by record count see what comes up that's a really large set of records so in this case you can see we've got databases with you know records in the tens of millions and you can kind of see if one of them has the information for the right time period that you might be interested in so enjoy those irish records this month those of you who have irish ancestry and of course you can always search the card catalog by any number of um ways as you sort it and search it by state or by um or by country that's how i typically use that so that is all i've got prepared for you today hopefully this was a useful update please do go check out the ancestry virtual exhibit hall over at rootstech.org we've got some great videos there for you and then if you have questions for me you can put them here in the comments i will read and respond to those or you can dm me on social media at any of the social media addresses there on your screen until next time i'm krista cowan have fun climbing your family tree

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 63,725

Rating: 4.9334917 out of 5

Keywords: ancestrydna, ancestry, 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, barefoot genealogist, genealogy conferences, find a grave, genealogy, 1940 census, irish records, ancestry hints, ethnicity estimate, communities

Id: RrLujceG26o

Length: 23min 41sec (1421 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021