What's New On Ancestry® | Featuring Crista Cowan Corporate Genealogist | Ancestry

hi everyone I am Christie County and the corporate genealogist here at ancestry and hello to our friends on Facebook that are joining us not at roots tech and this is kind of a fun topic for me I get to talk about what's new at ancestry but I get to do it here with you know 20 of my closest friends and a few thousand of my closest friends on Facebook instead of on the big stage right so that means that we can be a little bit more casual I don't have a big formal PowerPoint deck I don't have I just wanna make sure that I show you some of my favorite new things and then if you have some questions I'll repeat those so that we know what the questions are and we'll go through those we've got twenty five ish minutes together so let's dive right in okay how many of you know about the card catalog on ancestry see I'm teaching you well okay it's my favorite thing on our whole website besides just being a really really great resource it is also the place you can go at any time to see what is new in content or records on ancestry so some of you are looking at me with confused faces so let me just show you where you find it click on search and under the search menu down here almost to the bottom you're going to see the card catalog okay and if you go into the card catalog the default sort to the card catalog is by date added which means the newest stuff is automatically going to be at the top of the list we put this little new tag on every database and we leave it there for 90 days so if it says new it is new within the last 90 days so a couple of the things that you're going to see that are kind of a big deal some announcements they made this morning from the keynote if you were listening to Margo or CEO and Todd Godfrey our vice president of content they announced that we now have six million birth certificates from New York City 7 million death certificates from New York City and almost a million marriage licenses from New York City so those went online this morning okay we also have a large series of French birth marriage and death registers that just went online and then the big announcement this morning was about I think the numbers thirty eight million World War two draft cards so we've been scanning and digitizing these records at the National Archives in st. Louis for about six and a half years and we've been doing that in partnership with FamilySearch and we've been placing the state's online as we've finished them over the course of the last several years but we finally finished them all and they are out now all available on ancestry so they were on fold three so you used to be able to search the index on ancestry and then you'd have to have a fold three subscription to access the images all of those images are now available on ancestry so if you have that ancestry subscription you'll be able to access that so those are the big content announcements those are the new records that have been placed online recently with ancestry and as I mentioned again you come in here at any time and just see what's new now let me give you a little tip for the card catalog since we're sitting here the easiest way to search the card catalog is to use the title field and to search by state or by country okay so for example if I'm interested in Virginia I can just come in here and I can type in Virginia and hit enter and you'll notice it kind of adjusts the new stuff is still at the top so I've got this new collection of african-american Funeral programs from 1935 to 2009 that sounds fascinating sometimes I just look at content and if it has nothing to do with my family history I still go look at it cuz I'm a Jenny ology nerd okay so we have these the new stuff at the top you'll also start to see this right this little updated tag and here's what that means that means that sometime within the last 90 days something about that database was changed usually what it means is that we've added new records so for example let's see here the Virginia birth records it looks like they now go through 2015 so every state in the United States and every country in the world has different laws regarding privacy and access to records so for example here in the state of Utah we have a hundred year privacy law on birth records so no birth records are publicly available after 1920 if you want a birth record from after 1920 you have to be that person or be closely related to that person and you have to go to the county to get the record or to the state ok but prior to 1920 they're public which means they can be put online and all sorts of things right some states like the state of Texas Texas is what we call an open record state which means all of their birth marriage and death records are public record and most of them are online so if you were born in Texas or California or North Carolina your birth records probably online somewhere ok so every state controls that privacy law regarding their records some states that means have apparently Virginia has some law that said we couldn't have the birth records through a certain period of time it looks like it might be like a five year window there so about every five years or so ancestry will go and back to the state and see if we can get the next set of records that have become publicly available and we'll just add it to the existing databases and so what'll happen is you'll start to see these updated tags showing up on existing databases because we're adding the next set of years for that particular set of records did that make sense sometimes I explain things and I don't know if you're looking at me like raptly or you don't get it okay there we go well nice when I talk to you all through YouTube I just talked to my webcam so I have no idea what you look like so interactive is a little more fun so that's how I use the card catalog that's what those two tags mean new and updated are there any questions here about that going once going twice okay let's move on so that's the new records on ancestry now ancestry has also been doing a lot of new work on the other features of the site so one of the features on our site of course is our trees family trees on ancestry are free anybody can have a tree all you have to do is have a guest account you don't have to have a paid subscription you can build your tree on ancestry what that also means is that you can share your tree with anybody on ancestry they do not have to have a subscription they just have to have a log in okay what your subscription pays for is access to the records that are behind the paywall okay so that's the that's the difference there so in our family tree service one of the things that starts to happen is you get these little leaf hints I like spring so my tree has all the leaves some of you act like it's fall and you have a leaf blower and you want to clear all the leaves all the time and you get a little obsessive about it I just like spring okay so I have leaves all over my tree and in the last year we made some really major changes to how we deliver those leaf hints so some of the changes that we made this year are a little bit under the covers which means they might not be so obvious to some of you so we're going to look at the leaf hint changes that we made one of the changes that we made is that leaf hints are now delivered almost exclusively based off of the work that you're doing in your trees so for example if I find a 1940 census for my grandfather and I attached it to my tree and then I also attached his California birth record and his California marriage record and the 1930 census and his World War two enlistment record and I've got this nice little profile of records that I've built up attached to my grandfather now one of you comes along and you search for my grandfather and you find the 1940 census and you attach it to your tree guess what you're going to get his hints his California birth record and his California marriage record and that World War two enlistment record all those other records I've attached to that same person you're gonna show they're gonna show up to you as hints okay so that's how we're leveraging this really amazing community and the work that people are doing what that means is is that some of you who develop some not so great habit so just attaching everything because you're not sure and you don't want to lose it stop it if you see a hint and you're not sure if it's your person or not mark it maybe don't mark it yes okay let me show you where you're going to do that let's pick one of my ancestors here let's go to Albert I use Albert a lot let's see if I've used him too much nope he still has 20 hints okay so here is my great-grandfather and these are the hints that I have here for my great-grandfather on this page okay and so you're going to see we've got some photos we've got some stories we've got a clipping of his obituary if I scroll down here further there's some pictures I'm gonna get to some records eventually there we go there's his 1930 census record that looks like it's his social security death record there's his World War two draft card that just came online this morning and I haven't seen it yet I'm super excited okay I'm not gonna get distracted I promise so here we have these records okay and this is one of the changes that we recently made to the hint page right over here on the right hand side do you see where it says different different different new okay are up here it says different match match or down here it says same different new okay well we've done is for every field of information in the record we're going to tell you if that information is the same as what's in your tree if it's different than what's in your tree or if that's a new piece of information that you don't have so it helps increase your ability to look at that hint and decide is this really my person or not okay the other thing that we've done is we've given you this little toggle right here it's called a quick compare and again this is new let me go back to that 1880 record or 1930 there we go and I turn it on and it's actually going to show me a little clip of what's in my tree so not just that it's the different different or the same but it's actually going to say you have this in your tree and that's what's in the record and you have this in your tree and that's what's in the record and so it's another way for you to analyze that information and make sure if it's accurate before you save it okay because after you save it it's a lot harder to unsaved it and all the information so here's the challenge right records are messy I don't even know another way to say that right I don't know about you but I rarely find all records for a person where every piece of information is the same their name spelled the same their birthday it's the same like records are all over the place and so you need to put on your analytical brain and sometimes you need to look at two or three records to see right does this information match is this him is this him sometimes you have to scroll through three or four records okay before you can decide yes these three records are him and this one record is not so don't be so quick to just yes yes no no yes yes no no on your hints sometimes look at several of them together and this quick compare allows you to do that what that means is that the best practice for reviewing your hints is from the person page in your tree because while you're here it gives you all the context of the family and the facts and all the hints for that person together in order to make the best decisions about whether this record is for your person or not using the all hints list is fine if all you're doing is clicking through and ignoring things that you don't want in your tree but using the all hints list isn't always the best practice when you're trying to analyze records in context does that make sense are there any questions yes ma'am okay I'll repeat the question in a minute because I'm gonna answer that next okay okay so her she's saying she gets hints from her own tree but they're things that other people have copied and then re-uploaded the challenge is when somebody copies something out of your tree to their computer and then reuploads it to ancestry we have no way of knowing that that's the same picture or the same document so stop doing that y'all just use the Save button and if you save it instead of downloading it and then re uploading it if you just save it we know it's the same picture and then you're not going to get hints of your own stuff back to you okay okay let's talk about your question so her question was if I click ignore what happens or if I click Save what happens and then how does that information inform ancestry so I'm going to go ahead and just click ignore on this record even though that's his tombstone just to show you and don't worry it's not gonna break anything okay when you click ignore one of the new features we gave you this year is the ability if you want to tell us why you ignored that hint so we give you some pre selected options here the names wrong the places are wrong the relationships are wrong I already have this information the dates are wrong or you can write in your own reasoning or you can do both right so we give you these options to write why you ignored a hint and we look at that data and if a bunch of people are ignoring hints because the names are wrong maybe we need to look at our algorithm and see what's causing those hints to be delivered incorrectly okay so yes that information does inform us that information also informs you so I could for example write I just don't want to deal with this record right now right don't want to deal with it maybe I'm not ready to deal with the fact that he's dead and oh that scared me okay don't want to deal with it and then I stop typing and you'll see this little saved just auto-saves okay and now I can move on to my other hints if I want well that record went right up here into this ignored tab that's where it went and so I can click on ignore it or I can find that hint at any time and I can see my reason why I ignored it because here's what happens sometimes you ignore a record because you that's not my person and then you do more research and you're like okay maybe that was my person and so the hint is not gone forever you can come back to it you can look at your reasoning and maybe you can make a different choice now if you want okay so I like leaving myself notes here's what this is done for me it's kind of taken my research log and just made it really personal so professional genealogists we tend to keep really detailed research logs as we do research and we write down everything we search and what we find and what we don't find and sometimes that gets super tedious right what this allows me to do is just keep this little research log at each record attached to the person in this particular hint tab okay same thing with undecided if I say maybe on a hint maybe this is my person but I'm not sure we give you a set of reasons to answer that so it allows you to save the hint without attaching it to your tree if you don't know for sure if it's the person or not okay and then when you save a record same thing you can say here's why I decided this really is my person and you can and you can answer those questions and again it starts to form a little bit of a research log so that's one of the new things we've done on hints that feedback does come back to ancestry so that we can continually improve our hint algorithms to deliver you more relevant hints so that you can find what you're looking for but also it serves a purpose for you as well okay any questions about the new hint stuff going once going twice okay well today one last thing about hints and then we'll move on to something else so the other thing that we did kind of under the covers at ancestry this last year based on feedback from you was we created this thing called hint relevancy or hint hint that inventory management I think that was the official internal name for it basically what used to happen is you would put something in a tree and we would go out and search our hint databases and we would deliver hints and those hints would just be cached to your tree and they would just sit there and I don't know about you but I sometimes all enter information in my tree like I'll find the mother's name on a death certificate so I'll add a mother and all this tray name is Mary Smith and I don't know anything else about her yet because I'm researching her son but I just found her name on his death certificate and I want to save it so I put her in his Mary Smith well ancestry gets all excited and we go out we look for hints for Mary Smith all the Mary Smith's and we deliver you all the hints for Mary Smith and then you find out oh well his mother Mary Smith she was born in Virginia so then you go add her birthplace as Virginia because it says that on one of her other son's death certificates and then you find the family in the 1850 census and you realize how old she is and so then you put in an approximate birth year for her and now you know she was born and you know about 1831 in Virginia and now you're ready to start researching Mary Smith and so you go to your hints and you've got Mary Smith born in England in 1582 and Mary Smith born in Ohio and 1920 and MIT right because when we rant when you first put her in your tree we said oh look here's some Mary Smith hints and then they just sat there so that's what we were doing before so this year the change that we made is every time you add a new piece of information to a person or a new relationship to a person we refresh those hints and refresh those hints so what's gonna happen is sometimes you're gonna see a hint there one day and it'll be gone the next day because we don't think that hint is relevant anymore okay some of you that gives you anxiety I saw it just now on your face don't we don't think they're relevant okay if it is you'll find it again it will come back okay sometimes that also means in the process of refreshing your hints sometimes it just means things get ordered reordered so that might still be on the list of hints for that person just in a different place on the list okay so that's the hence inventory management that's a total behind the scenes thing that's happening so it's not something like new shiny thing that we gave you but it's a super relevant super important thing that we gave you that you didn't even know we did for you till I just now told you and how happy are you about that okay any questions about that yeah haha yep so her question is when everybody else's tree is wrong and yours is right do you ever notice that that's the case everybody else's tree is wrong but mine's right if that is true then your tree is wrong too right because I think every okay sorry I'm making fun of you yes there are a lot of very simple mistakes that happen just because people are learning there are sometimes mistakes that have been perpetuated because of a research error decades ago that have made it into all these trees what I'm going to tell you is instead of trying to play whack-a-mole with information in other people's trees publish good research put the right parents into a public tree and list the sources and include maybe a story or a comment on that person that explains why you think these really are the parents the best antidote for bad research is good research published widely right it's not trying to fix everybody else's tree okay okay let me share with you I've got four minutes let me share with you one last new thing how many of you here in person have taken an ancestry DNA test okay so what I'm going to show you is not available yet don't tell anybody all of you watching on Facebook okay so now we're going to start testing this later this week and they gave me permission to share it with you so when you have taken an ancestry DNA test you of course get your list of DNA matches now I'm going to show you my live match list and even though we're filming this and putting it online all the top people here are my immediate family and they've given me permission to share all the things all the time okay so I've taken a DNA test and there's a new little icon that it's going to start to show up okay and this new little icon does this it allows me to say when I click it this person nice match list it's the same as this person already in my tree right and so it just it just serves as a pointer so that I can click on this so let's click on my brother here actually let's click on this brother I like him better anyway Shh okay so I'm gonna click oh max okay I'm going to click on this brother somehow I'm clicking something wrong but we'll get there okay and now this little icon shows up right here and when I click it it pops it a little side panel and because I've linked it I can now say view and tree and when I click that it takes me to that person in my tree oh wait it goes both ways you ready for this let's see if I can get this to work here's that little icon in my tree I click it it says this one this person is connected to a DNA match and then when I click that it says oh look here's that person in your match list life-changing let me tell you what happened they said hey we're going to announce this next week at RIT's Tech it's not out yet but we want to give you early access they did that to me Friday at 4 o'clock we know you had a lot to do this weekend to get ready for RIT stick but here's this new toy to play with guess what I did all day Saturday connecting people because I'm one of those people and you might be as well every time I find a match and I figure out how they're related to me now I just showed you my brother that's easy right but when you start getting into second cousins and third cousins and fourth cousins those people that are connecting you to third and fourth and fifth great-grandparents and providing that evidence that you need I add those people to my tree right and so I want to just be able to quickly say oh this person on my match list that's using the you know username ugly brother for 21 is this person in my tree who is this descendant of my third great-grandfather and I want to be able to see that evidence start to line up but I'm genetically connected indeed to this third great-grandfather through all of these notches okay so we're going to be doing a class specifically on the DNA matching tools here in the booth later so make sure you pick up a booth schedule I'll take one last maybe two last questions how are you singing that there a DNA match if you're I always send you an email yeah so one of the new things that we did and I didn't have time to get into it but one of the new things we did this year on your DNA match list is we gave you the ability to search your match list by username so if you get the username you can just search for them that way well you can also filter just to a section of your match list based on the amount of shared DNA so if you know this is a third cousin you can say show me everybody that's listed as a third cousin and it will just filter your list right down to that okay oh yeah there's loads hey some of us work at it okay last question so her question is about for those of us who use Family Tree Maker or rootsMagic as our desktop software program those two programs are the only two software programs that sync with your online tree at ancestry so I do a lot of my data entry and Family Tree Maker I sync it with my online tree of ancestry I attach the records I sync it back with Family Tree Maker so that's how that works every time we make a change to the Tree Service we notify them and then they have to decide if they want to make that a feature that also syncs or not so as far as I know the brand brand-new stuff of course hasn't been implemented yet but if you touch then they might be able to give you some insight into how that works okay well that's all we have time for today thank you all here thank you on Facebook bye everybody you

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 40,732

Rating: 4.9330945 out of 5

Keywords: ancestrydna, ancestry, genealogy, finding your roots, family tree now, best dna test, dna test, dna results, ancestry dna, ancestors, family search, dna ancestry test, ancestry.com, ancestry genealogy, ancestry search, ancestry commercial, ancestry family tree, family secrets, family connections, ancestry health, ancestry dna health, dna health, health kit, health, health test, health results, dna test ancestry, ancestry dna results, dna tests, dna test kit, Crista Cowan

Id: gqY1HyBXMGg

Length: 25min 24sec (1524 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2020