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

hi everyone krista cowan here with another episode of the barefoot genealogist it is time for a what's new at ancestry episode this is for may of 2021. if you've never joined us for a what's new episode before we're going to cover three things we're going to talk about some of the upcoming genealogy conferences and events that you might be interested in to further your genealogy education we're going to talk about some of the new features and updates to both the ancestry online site and the mobile app and then we're going to talk about new content all those records that are available to help you make the discoveries about your ancestors that you're looking for so with that introduction let's go ahead and dive in we have quite a bit to cover today we are going to start by talking about uh conferences and events so this year we continue to have virtual events the roots tech conference that was held in february of this year is still available all of that content has been made available on demand for free for the remainder of the year and you can find that at rootstech.org of course if you visit the little vendor exhibit hall there's a link in the top right corner go to the ancestry webpage you'll see all of the videos from the ancestry presenters including myself on that page coming up very soon this month is the national genealogical society's annual conference last year they merged with the federation of genealogical societies and so this year is a joint conference held the third week of may the official conference runs the 19th and 20th but they do have events that's a thursday and friday but they do have events starting on monday so if you are part of a genealogical society they're doing their societies libraries archives and museums day on tuesday and then they will run an on-demand library starting in june so if you go to their website the address is there on your screen you'll be able to see what they're offering for that virtual event southern california genealogical society's genealogy jamboree is actually going to run over two weekends this year so it'll start the weekend of the fourth and it'll end up the weekend of the 12th the first weekend will be their dna conference and then the second weekend will be their traditional family history conference it is entirely virtual and again this the address to register is there on your screen so lots of really great opportunities for genealogy education and of course you're always welcome here um to join us on the ancestry youtube channel we also do facebook lives about every two weeks over on the ancestry facebook page so if you're not following us there be sure to check that out now there have been a lot of changes to the site lately that some are small some are big so we're going to run through some of those next first up let's talk about the ancestry home page so what you see here on your screen is the traditional homepage that we've had on ancestry for maybe 10 years or more lots of information happening there we transitioned to a new what we call two tile home page a few years ago so if you are new to ancestry within just the last few years this is totally foreign to you but if you've been with us for a long time you may never have been transitioned over to that new homepage well in the middle of that transition ancestry moved our entire databases of records i mean terabytes and petabytes of data to the cloud and so that transition kind of put a stop to the migration from one home page to the other well that transition has been completed so now we are resuming some things on the site that we had started and one of those is update to the logged in home page so if you have this old home page you're going to see this banner here across the top of the page so that you can check out the new home page so you can click the little view update button there this is what the new home page looks like it's a lot cleaner and easier you've got your family tree here on the left your access to your dna results here on the right this will always show you the last tree that you worked on and you can click on this as the last person that you worked on or you can just click to go to your tree you can view your hints you can start a new search all of that can be done from here of course then you can also access your dna results if you scroll down this page all those other things that you are used to are going to be a little further down the page we've also given you the option to take a tour here so that will show you where different things have been moved to to familiarize yourself with that new homepage and if you don't like it for now you can switch back to the old homepage okay the next major update that has happened to the site in the last couple of months is the new hints side panel now there's been a lot of talk about this online so i'm actually going to spend quite a bit of time on this if you are in interested at all in why we did that we'll talk about that first then i'll show you how i use it and talk about a couple of the little quirks that i've seen some of you mention so first up one of the challenges with the old hints review process is that you were reviewing those hints in kind of a vacuum of information so you would click it would have to load a whole new page so there was the time it would take to do that and then you weren't on the page that had the tree and the sources and the family members that allowed you to kind of compare so you were just looking at this information and so many of you told us that you were like using notebooks to like jot down information so that you could keep that in your mind while you were comparing the information on the record if you were like me you were opening things in all the new tabs and then having to toggle back and forth between tabs to compare that information so the immediate problem that this solves couple of them one is there's no wait for a page to load and two is you have all of the information right here in front of you while you are reviewing the record now one of the things that i've heard some of you say is that why is it so small well there's two things you might want to know one is the font size exactly the same size so when you used to load the old page it only took up like this much of the page and you had all this white space on the side so the actual font size is the same and you have this little out arrow here that you can click to like expand it a little bit further it'll just remove this white space here between the family and the hint and then the column width is exactly the same as it always was so it might feel a little bit smaller just because we're putting it on the page with some other things but the actual size is the same the second thing that um we've heard is well i want to click i want to view the record well you can still view the record just like you always did so you used to click the hint um to review the hint and sometimes that would take you straight into a merge flow and sometimes it would take you to a record page then you would have to click to view the image same thing here you just open up the side panel when you click the hint you can view the image directly now if you still want to go through the old hint hints review process you can just click this link right here this blue title of the database is a clickable link that takes you to the old record page so same essentially the same record page it's just in this side view click that it will open it up so that you can see that old record page now let's actually go and walk through a hint because there's been a lot of questions about this so we're going to go to my three times great grandmother because i weighed we're going to look at an 1870 census record for her and i'm going to click review and what you're going to see is that side panel pops out over here and what you'll notice is while the side panel is open i can scroll up and down a lot of kids i can scroll up and down the family members i can see who her parents and siblings and spouse and children are i can click over here to the facts tab and i can see what records i've already saved for her what information i know about her in this facts column i can go to the gallery and see what additional information i have about her there so i can fully navigate around my profile page in the tree while i'm reviewing the hint and that's so important to be able to compare the two and so that you're not just saving records that might not even be for your family members uh now there i'm gonna expand this a little bit so you can see what happens right so i expand it and then this is the same column width as it was before if i'm over here on my hints tab same thing i can expand it in and out and i've got some independent navigation between these two tabs so that's an important thing for comparing information at this point it's pretty much just like it was before right so once you reviewed the hint you have the opportunity then to say yes no or maybe if there's an image i'm always always always going to want to view that image now i am um i often open it in a new tab still because i want to be able to toggle back and forth between what was indexed and what's on the actual image if you want to just click it it will just open it right there as a pop over and you can review the image there and then close it and come back to this merge process however that works for you if you come directly to the image you can click yes no or maybe here and you can go through your review process that way or again just close the tab and come back to this screen now just like always every name on that record is a clickable link so i can click any one of these to rotate the record you just always want to make sure that whatever name you click that the primary person on the record you're viewing is the same as the person whose profile pages so you don't want to save a record for example for one of her children to her even though she's mentioned on that record so you always want to make sure that the record that you're saving in the profile page that you're on are the same another great reason why i love this side by side view in particular so i'm going to say i've reviewed this i've reviewed the image i'm going to click yes this is her and now it just walks us through that merge process the coloring is a little bit different but information is mostly there the process is mostly the same i can edit everything anything just like i could before i can either click edit all and it opens every field for editing or i can click on any field that i want to edit and it will just open that single field so that's a little bit different it used to be kind of just all all open now we're compacting the information just a little bit giving you control over whether you want to edit one field or all the fields okay um i can also save information um i can decide what i want to cite as a source and what i don't so for example this record has her name on it yes i want to use this record as a source citation for her name even though there's nothing different on this record i'm going to scroll down here i have a more complete birth date than the birth date that was on the census record obviously but this census provides source is a source or evidence for that so i can add that if i want to copy the information from the record into my tree i would just check this box here on the left if i want to then use it as an alternate and not overwrite what's in my tree i can also do that now i'm of the opinion that people were only born once they should only have one birthday in a tree um and then i just add all of the evidence that i use to come to the conclusion about the date in my tree um as sources for that i don't add all the birth dates as alternates i think a i think it's cluttery and b i don't think it's a very clean um um genealogy practice to get into people will have lots of residents they may have multiple marriages but they only were born once and they only died once so i only list those in my tree once i just make sure i save that source citation now this is a new piece of information that it's saving to my tree and again this is the same process we went through before i'm just showing you kind of a little nitty-gritty detail about it if this wasn't a new event i can click this not a new event and select a fact already in my tree to attach it to and then it's going to show me that that you know just the other family members in case i want that information when this is expanded out it kind of covers that up a little bit and so i can still see that information now i'm going to save that to my tree and then if i want to i can come in here and add a little bit of a hint evaluation the name's right the relationships are right the dates are right the places are right um however you don't have to do that i do that just so that when i review hints or when somebody questions something in my tree i can go back and just jump right back into kind of my head space when i was doing that so that's the new hint feature now one of the things you may have noticed we get asked this question a lot you might be surprised on this record there are uh lots of other people listed in fact this is a daughter of hers that was i think newly uh widowed um this is another daughter this is a grandchild this is a grandchild grandchild grandchild right so why did it only add to her well here's why prior to 1880 so 1850 1860 1870 those censuses list every person in the household on the record just like you see here but they do not list the relationship of those people to the head of household now i know those relationships only because i've already done this research and already figured that out but when i'm saving this record a i don't always know those relationships and b the relationships are not expressly stated on the on the record and so a computer the ancestor computer doesn't know how to link that to those people so for the 18 50 60 and 70 censuses you do have to link them one at a time to each person from 1880 on the census lists the relationships to the head of household and so you it will just the next screen after what you just saw in my hint review would then say okay now who in the family do you want to also link this record to and i could walk through that same process for them automatically but prior to 1880 that information doesn't exist so the way that i do it i just come in here once i've attached the record to her as the head of household i'm going to open this in a new tab and then i'm going to click on the next person in the record which is her daughter and i might even do this let's get really crazy i might even go through and just open in a new tab every one of these because then what happens is i can save this record to lucinda and then when i'm done with that i can close that tab and then i can save it to george when i'm done with that i can close that tab and so on until i get right back to the beginning so i so i know exactly who i've saved it to and who i haven't and um i find that that's the fastest and easiest way without having to use scratch paper to keep track of what the heck i'm doing so that's the new hint review or hint um flow process if you have questions about it feel free to leave them here i'm happy to do some little update videos maybe over on my instagram stories or in next month's what's new video to just cover off on some of those questions but i find it a lot faster a lot easier and i love having the information right there in front of my face all the time the first several times you use it you're going to have to kind of go through bit by bit and be really particular about it just to get used to it but once you do most people are reporting that it's going uh quite a bit faster for them so there's that okay a couple of other things if you use the free ancestry mobile app there is a fun new feature if you open the app and go to your discover tab you're going to see an option to create a photo line so if you're a female it's going to follow your female line and if you're a male it's going to follow your paternal maternal paternal line and basically it just takes the photos directly from your tree so me my mom my grandma my great-grandma and it just creates a little fun little image a lot of times people want to compare i love looking into the faces of my ancestors and seeing do i have her smile do i have her nose like it's just a fun way to do that and then if you want to publish or post that on social media on your facebook page or on instagram you can do hashtag photoline and please use the hashtag because i will be following that hashtag and seeing what else pops up and i would love to see some of your creations from that so that's in the ancestry mobile app only and it is a free mobile app so if you haven't downloaded it it is available for ios and android devices you'll want to take a look at that okay it's time for historical records so much new content that has been added to the site so in just march and april there were 63 million records added to the ancestry site 63 million opportunities to make discoveries and already just in these first few days of may we have added an additional 8.3 million records so there's just so much new content constantly coming out now of those 63 million records i wrote down notes so that i could keep track of those 63 million records 28 million of them are in brand new databases so entirely new databases on ancestry and 35 million of them have been added to existing databases if you've never joined us for a what's new before you might not know how to um how to find these records so that's what i want to make sure that you can do i'm trying to find my little my little um x out of this it's hidden under the hidden under the camera on my computer there we go okay we're going to come in here to ancestry and awesome and let me just show you a few a few of those new records so for those of you who aren't familiar with the card catalog it's my favorite thing on the website it will be your new best friend or i will one of the two for showing it to you it's the card catalog so under search you click on card catalog and that's where you're going to see all of the new records or updated records now the default sort on this list is date added date added means that's the brand new databases you can also sort it by date updated and then not only will you see the new databases you'll also see the updated databases anytime we update a database we usually will put in information about what was updated if you click through to view that particular database so let's talk about what should we talk about new first or updated first let's talk about updated first because there's some really cool updates so the first update is to the new york passenger list database so ancestry published this back in 2004 and at the time it had about 83 million records in that database when we first published it the new york passenger list database contains every existing passenger list for people who came into the port of new york where that passenger list still remains wasn't lost or destroyed or whatever so that includes people who just showed up in new york in their early to mid 1800s and got off the boat and the the passenger list from the ship's captain was copied and provided to authorities it also includes all the people who are processed through castle garden as an immigration station and the paper the the passenger lists from that it also contains starting in 1892 ellis island for the couple of decades that it existed and and people were being processed through ellis island as they came into the port of new york and that database also contains people who flew into jfk in the 1950s right so it doesn't matter how you came into the port of new york any passenger lists for ships or airships all of those are going to be contained in that one database now if you've looked at a passenger list ever you know depending on the time period they have all sorts of varying degrees of information my favorite passenger lists are the ones from the late 1800s into the early 1900s that contain so much information they contain information like height and hair color and eye color and any distinguishing marks or scars or tattoos they contain also two really important pieces of information for family historians one is the name of the nearest relative i left in the country of origin and the name of the person i am coming to in the united states and those two pieces of information have been so critical for so many of us in breaking through brick walls to figure out where they were from in the old country who their relatives were there how to tell them apart from the other people with the same name from the same place who they were coming to has given us insight into the chain migration in families if they were coming to a family member or a friend so so much good information but when ancestry first indexed these records back in 2004 we only indexed the name of the primary person on the record their age um if they put in their birthplace the port they left from the port they were coming to the ship they came on now we have gone back through these records and we have indexed every single piece of information on them right down to the scars on the forehead and the tattoo on the arm um the height the hair color and the names of those two people and their relationships and their addresses so what happens is if that person is an immediate family member like i left behind my father in berlin and here's his address because it's an immediate family member we've created a new record for that person and it's what's called on ancestry a rotated record which means you could do a search for that father and it would come up with a record now the record in that case is only going to list him and his son that immigrated and you might think there's not much information there but as soon as you click on that son's name up pops all the information about the record so we've created rotated records for make sure i give you the right number for about 13 million additional people those immediate family members of some of those 83 million passengers that came through the port of new york in addition to that um if the person on the other end was also an immediate family member we would provide that as a rotated record as well now about nine million of the people listed usually on the back end but also sometimes on the front end we're not immediate family members in which case we can't save both to the tree because they're not directly connected so if this was a friend or an uncle or a brother-in-law it'll still show up if you do a search on the new york passenger list database but that person's name will not show up in a global search so it's a kind of a sub um name to the existing record rather than us creating a new record out of that hopefully that makes sense again as always if you have questions leave them here in the comments on youtube and i'll be sure to keep an eye out for those and answer those questions so that's one of the biggest sets of records in an existing database that have been updated let's talk next about um united states obituaries so many of you know that last fall ancestry uh released a whole collection i'm actually gonna swap over here um i've got like three things running on a screen um ancestry released an entire collection there we go now you can see my face um we released an entire collection of obituaries connected to newspapers so newspapers.com is a separate website owned by ancestry um it has different search functionality it has different image viewers like the experiences are very different and they have to be because newspapers by its nature is kind of a very different um thing that requires some different technology we ancestry has some brilliant brilliant brilliant engineers and scientists and people who went through and created an algorithm that can read a page of newspaper and segment out what the articles are on a page of newspaper and then there's another algorithm they created that could go through and read those newspaper pages and determine if this is an obituary or a marriage or just some random snippet of information or a news article or whatever the case may be and then there's another algorithm that goes through and once those articles have been identified as an obituary for example it reads the obituary and creates a fielded searchable record out of that so it's an index rather than being an index to the whole page of newspaper it's an index to that one article and it'll list like so and so is the person who died and this is their parents and this is when and where they were born and this is their surviving spouse and their surviving children and there's an index now searchable on ancestry to that we did that last fall i've got a couple videos out about that if you want to go look for those but new newspapers come online constantly so new newspapers meaning the newspapers that were published in the last six months but also new acquisition of newspapers of historical newspapers so we continue to run those algorithms on any new papers acquired whether current or historical and what that means is is that there were 16 million new u.s obituaries added to the existing u.s newspapers obituaries index on ancestry so some really cool new finds obituaries are a gold mine of information and then um the last updated record collection that i want to talk about is the 1939 register in england so in england um at the beginning of the war there was uh it wasn't a census it was a register that was created of individuals who lived in the country at the time and because of privacy laws in england the many of those records have been redacted so unless the government was officially informed of this person's death and they were born within the last hundred years i think it's 100 it might be 110. um there's a black line through that name or that record on the page some of you who've worked with the 1939 register are familiar with that so what happens then is as updated information is given to the government they can unredact those records and we can remove the black line okay that's kind of the basic explanation what that means is that the most recent update to the 1939 register includes 440 000 new records that are now unredacted and that information is publicly available so really great uh great set of records okay um so those are the updated records two new sets of records that i want to just tell you about quickly before we run out of time there's never enough time i could talk to you all forever right um so the first one is the denmark census so the denmark census was just released um a week or so a week or two ago it is 16 individual databases so there were multiple censuses taken over multiple periods of time um the censuses start in 1769 and they go through 1901 so 1769 to 1901 denmark census records there's about 16 million records in those collective 16 databases of course you know as population grows there's fewer records in the earlier ones and more records in the later ones there is actually an entire other index coming so all of these records are indexed except the 1901 census it is just images so we are indexing it the index will be available soon so that you can search and just find it but if you don't want to wait you can go to the card catalog type in 1901 denmark it'll come up and you can browse by location just like you would a reel of microfilm in the library right um so that you can use that 1901 census if you've got family in denmark last set of records i want to tell you about are new hampshire so new hampshire only has a population today of about a million people but ancestry just launched 8 million records for um new hampshire they are birth marriage death divorce and revolutionary war records and they date from ready for this uh 16 31 1631 through 1971 so 300 plus years of records for the state of new hampshire so if you've got family from there you're going to want to go check that out again if you go to the card catalog on ancestry the default sort will be by date added if you're watching this in the month of may of 2021 they will probably be right there near the top if you're watching this later just type in new hampshire they should come up right right away you might have to flip the sort a little bit depending on what's what else has been added for the state of new hampshire but birth marriage death divorce and revolutionary war records for the state of new hampshire are all now available eight million of them on ancestry we did it y'all okay well let's um let me flip back over here that was like i said quite a bit of information to throw at you i will try to put a little bit of an index into the video description so if you need to go back to any segment of the video to re-watch it you can just click on that in the video description and it will jump to that spot in the video where i talked about that thing and if you want to share any of this information out please use the share feature here on youtube to share it with your friends or family or genealogical societies who might be interested if you have questions of course you can comment here on the youtube channel i will pay attention to those and respond as necessary and if you just want to connect with me elsewhere on social media you can do that at either the facebook or instagram address there on your screen that's all i've got for you today until next time i'm krista cowan have fun climbing your family tree

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 51,962

Rating: 4.9615049 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

Id: L5FBn3DNO9g

Length: 33min 6sec (1986 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021