Hurley's World

I feel an odd connection to Ellis Island, a place I’ve never been to personally. But two of my grandparents and all but one set of my great-grandparents found themselves there at one time or another.

I discovered this fact last week when two passenger lists I’d been looking for finally found me, too. I’d like to credit the discoveries to my dedication and persistence, but mostly I finally lucked out and found the right wildcards for my search.

Now, between passenger lists, naturalization records and other document trails my family created after coming to America, I’m starting to piece together my own family’s stories of immigration. Like the one about the great-grandfather who declined to accept his American citizenship because he’d given up and returned to Italy (his naturalization records are a fantastic read). Or the story that I’m still trying to understand: why my great-grandparents left their three young children in Austria-Hungary/Yugoslavia/Slovenia for nine years during World War I, while they set up house in America. 

I’m also getting a better understanding of my family’s first moments in America through the newly released Ellis Island Oral History collection at Ancestry.com. Listening to the accounts of immigrant Lawrence Meinwald, who was about the same age as my great-uncle when he first saw the Statue of Liberty in 1920, and Lillian Galetta, who, at age four, experienced an emotional reunion with her father at Ellis Island, is helping me grasp what was going through the minds of my own family when they reached American soil. Approximately 1,700 stories from immigrants are featured in this free collection, and each one offers greater insight into what it was like and what drove families to become new residents in a new world. 

Immigration-related records provide some of the most revealing details available about an immigrant ancestor’s American experience as well as the life left back home. And we’ve collected the whole batch as well as tips for searching and understanding more at www.ancestry.com/immigration. Search for your own family’s journey to America or read and listen to the experiences of others. In addition to the oral histories, we’ve also added nearly 2 million new naturalization record indexes and additional Boston passenger and crew lists to the collection. Plus, through Labor Day, we’re opening our entire U.S. Immigration Collection to everyone – you can search all 170 million+ records with or without an Ancestry.com subscription.

Hopefully you, too, will find your family’s Ellis Island – or Galveston, Baltimore, Angel Island, Philadelphia, Castle Garden, or another port entirely – connection. Let me know when you do.

Sometimes I get a story from an Ancestry.com member that’s just so wonderful I have to share it. The following, from Kathy Kennard, fits that description perfectly: 

“My great-grandfather, Hans Knutson, came from Norway and, according to family history, had a bit of a lisp. When he told the officials his name, they understood him to say Newton, rather than Knutson. That was the name that was written down. He liked it, according to a relative, so he decided to keep it, although it was never changed legally.

Most of my great-grandfather’s sisters kept the Knutson name; only one used the name ‘Newton’ like Hans. I, however, didn’t know this for many years, which made tracing this family a bit difficult.

One day, my mom made the remark that Hans had some relatives named Moe. She wasn’t sure how they were related but just had some recollection of that fact. So I did a little research and found the Moe family. It felt like a small and somewhat odd lead but I was willing to go anywhere it took me.

I found a Kari Moe who came from Norway at about the same time Hans had so I contacted someone from her family. The man that I spoke to was adamant that his grandmother, Kari, was not related. Her maiden name was Knutson, not Newton and he knew the Newton clan, as they were all neighbors, and they were just not related. ‘Surely someone would have mentioned it before now,’ was his response.

Several months later, this same man called me. His aunt had just passed away and it was his responsibility to clean out her house. In her Bible, he found some obituaries: one was the obituary of his grandmother. It listed each of his grandmother’s sisters and her brother, Hans Newton. He called me in excitement and to apologize. He also wanted to let me know that on the wall was a picture of Hans Newton with each of his sisters, and he was happy to make a copy for me.

I now have a picture of my great-grandfather and the history of the Moe family, which I would have never had if I hadn’t followed that one lead through Ancestry.com.”

Thanks Kathy. And if anyone else has a story to share, send it to stories@ancestry.com.

By the way, if you want to learn tricks, tips and how-tos for success with immigration records, do what I did: take all the hands-on advice you can get from Ancestry Weekly Discovery editor, Juliana Szucs Smith. Attend her FREE online class, Coming to America: Finding Your Immigrant Ancestors, tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern. You can register for the live class or watch it at a later date in our archive (live classes hit the archive about a day after broadcast) at http://learn.ancestry.com/LearnMore/Webinars.aspx.

Over the past few months we have released 3 new projects keyed through the World Archives Project, England, Newspaper Index Cards, Sydney and New South Wales, Sands Street Index, 1861-1930 and Perth, Scotland, Survey of Inhabitants, 1766, 1773.  The indexes for these projects, containing more than 1.27 million records, can be searched for free due to the efforts of 5500+ contributors! 

The Andrews Collection, aka England, Newspaper Index Cards, is a collection of newspaper clippings, and transcriptions, pasted onto index cards detailing births, marriages, etc.  (I still recall keying the announcements for the death of a serviceman and less than a month later the birth of his son; my heart ached for the young wife.)  Although these records were not the easiest to key it was definitely worth the time it took to bring these events to life. 

The Sydney and New South Wales, Sands Street Index, 1861-1930, was our first directory project keyed by the community.  In Australia directories are important to family history research due to the lack of census records -researchers can track their ancestors location through time and hopefully find the names of other relatives.

And Perth, Scotland, Survey of Inhabitants, 1766, 1773 records landlords and tenants – sometimes appearing as letters and more often as easy to follow forms.  The landlords were requested to provide an account of their tenants, sub-tenants and familes including their occupations and what parish they came from so this collection is a treasure trove of information.

Congratulations to our World Archive Project contributors! 

The Ancestry.com World Archives Project allows anyone, anywhere to help preserve history by typing facts from historical records into searchable online collections that are free to the public. Click here to learn more about joining our community of contributors.

You’ve been waiting patiently and it’s finally here! Family Tree Maker 2011 introduces more than 100 enhancements (many based on customer requests) to help you create your family story like never before. Here are just a few of the exciting new features you’ll enjoy:

• Smart Stories—a narrative tool. If you’ve always wanted help starting your own family history book, this is the tool you’ve been waiting for. Smart Stories helps you quickly fill up those blank pages by letting you use facts, sources, and notes you’ve already entered in your tree. Simply drag-and-drop the text into your story. And smart story text is linked to your tree; if you make changes, text will be updated automatically.
• New and improved charts. In addition to four new fan charts, you’ll be able to enhance your charts with new backgrounds, borders, and embellishments. You can even change fonts based on fact types.
• New and improved reports. Ancestor and descendant reports have been improved and added to. You’ll also find a new Surname Report, the ability to sort custom reports, and the option to save and reuse report settings.
• More Ancestry integration. Ancestry.com has millions of members all over the world. And now you can find out which members are searching for your ancestors by viewing Member Connect activity in the expanded Web Dashboard. You’ll also see links to message boards and notification of your new Ancestry messages. In addition, uploading and downloading speeds have been improved.
• New media management tools. Now you can drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste, and even categorize multiple items at the same time. You’ll also find a new tool that helps you locate missing media files.

To view or download a PDF list of the new enhancements, click here. To purchase Family Tree Maker 2011, click here.

Also, in coming weeks I’ll be writing about how to use some of these new features. Please come back to the blog to learn more and also to let others knows how 2011 is working for you.

I posted a blog about the new pages in new search a few weeks ago.  But there were so many changes that I think each one should have a dedicated post.  The location of an Ancestor’s birth or residence greatly influenced their life story.  By browsing by location, I found a book about Hopewell New Jersey where some of my Dansburys used to live.  The stories in that book give a real flavor of the town people’s lives even if there is nothing specific about my Dansburys.  So I encourage you to go forth and browse!

Map on search homepage
Start browsing by clicking on the map or a link below the map on the new search homepage (http://search.ancestry.com/search/).  You can browse either the data collections that are unique to or related to specific places. There are thousands of new place pages for countries, states, territories, provinces and counties.

 

 

Collections by Place

Data collections are organized by category.  On the collection tab for each place, you can see the data collections that are unique to each place.

To see all the data collections in a category, click the “view all” link at the bottom of a category. It will take you to a page that displays the data collections in a category that are unique to that place and those that are related to that place.

On the right side of the page, there is a feature to let you switch locations without having to return to the search homepage. 

 You can switch regions, countries, or narrow to a specific county. If you narrow to a county and decide to go back to a larger location, just use the breadcrumb (chain of links) at the top of the page.

US State Pages & UK Country Pages

For US states and UK countries you can find links to extra resources and a history of the important events that occurred in that place. Look for the “history” and “resource” buttons.

History Tab

Understanding the history of a place can help you understand what happened in your ancestor’s lives, why they made certain choices, and what types of opportunities and obstacles they faced. Clicking on the history tab provides a brief set of basic milestones & statistics, a historical image, genealogy related facts, featured data collections, and some sample images of famous people from the place you are looking at.  This tab is meant to help you get started on your place based research and not a comprehensive history of a place.

 

 

Resources Tab

On the resources tab you can find links to public organizations outside of Ancestry.  Most resource pages include background information on census research, vital records, and local resources such as local libraries, genealogical societies, or historical societies.

What about searching?

You can do that too.  There is a search button at the top right corner of the place pages. When you click it, a form will pop-up to allow you to search with residence pre-populated with the location that corresponds to the place page.  The search results are summarized by category rather than sorted by relevance.  (This form will be changing in the future but the results will remain categorized.)

A few more tidbits

These pages are loaded with goodies.  I haven’t mentioned them all.  Here are a few more:

• On the main data collection page, there is a printer friendly link towards the top right side.  You can print a list of all the collections we list for each place and check each one off as you browse through it.
• On the right side bar there are links to view a map, find related message boards, and search the member directory for people doing research or looking for help in a particular place.
• Finally there is a section to send us feedback about our place pages.  It is at the last link on the right side bar.  We would really like your help in maintaining and expanding these pages.  The web addresses of local institutions change frequently, you may know about a great public resource that we have not listed, or have a great idea for a new feature.  Giving us feedback through this survey will help make the places even better.

Many places restrict access to vital records but place based records abound.  Although I think my Dansbury side came over to the United States in the late 1700s, I am hoping I can find a connection between a little town in New Jersey and Grosse Pointe Michigan to help me understand why my grandfather’s entire family moved in the early 1900s.

Good luck in all of your place-based research!

Laura Dansbury

If you are a member of our Ancestry World Archives community then you know all about the World Record Challenge.  If you are not yet a member of our community, we thought we would let you in on what we have been doing and give you a chance to participate.

Our passionate and engaged community has keyed and arbitrated over 7.4 million records since June 1st.  We’ve had fun with weekly and monthly challenges and we gave some great prizes out along the way.  Collectively, our community has earned over 68,000 votes which they have cast for record sets they want to key next.  Additionally, thousands of contributors have learned about new types of genealogical records and received lots of practice reading old handwriting.  All of these things can only make our personal family history research even better.

We only have two days left in the challenge (today and tomorrow) so we thought we’d give you one last chance to get in on the action.  We have two, one-year, World Deluxe subscriptions for Ancestry.com up for grabs – one today and one tomorrow.  The individual who keys and/or arbitrates the most records each day wins.  It’s as simple as that.

So, head on over to the Ancestry World Archives Project, sign up using your Ancestry.com login and password, download the keying tool, and start keying!

Family Tree Maker 2011 is almost here. Join us for a free webinar on September 15th at 8:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time and discover why it’s the best version yet.

You’ll learn how to:

• Use Smart Stories—a new narrative tool to help you create and share family stories.
• Create new fan charts.
• Dress up your charts using photographs and embellishments.
• Add your own historical events to timelines.
• And much more.

To attend the Family Tree Maker 2011 webinar, click here to register.

And if you have questions you’d like answered, please enter them in the Comments section below. We’ll try to respond to them during the webinar or on the blog. (Please limit your questions to functionality available in Family Tree Maker 2011.) We appreciate your questions and look forward to talking to you soon. Thanks!

Have you missed past webinars? You can view them any time at FamilyTreeMaker.com.

If you’re a family historian that enjoys getting to know your ancestors, you’ll love our new U.S. School Yearbook collection. Now, with more than 60 million yearbook records available, you just might find that grandpa was voted class clown or even discover great-grandma’s salutatory speech.

The new U.S. School Yearbook collection makes starting your family history even easier by adding an entirely new dimension to your research. Yearbooks contain graduation and candid photos, which add insight into an ancestor’s extracurricular activities in school. Along with our ever-expanding database of billions of other historical records, the U.S. School Yearbook collection will help you discover the deeper details about your ancestors that you may have not otherwise been able to find.

Like Barbara Lily, who experienced an amazing discovery in the yearbook collection.  Her father’s parents were immigrants and too busy raising 7 children to worry about taking pictures. So Barbara had never seen any pictures of her father in his childhood…that is until she stumbled across the U.S. School Yearbook collection and found a 1928 photo of her father in 8th grade. Barbara couldn’t believe the face that stared back at her. Long after time had taken her father, history had held onto a piece of him, and helped Barbara discover a part of her father that she had never known.

The new U.S. School Yearbook collection is fully searchable by name, state, city, school, year and even estimated date of birth. So even if you have searched this database before, with the addition of millions of records, you’re bound to find something new.

This addition makes Ancestry.com the home to the world’s largest searchable online yearbook collection. The records, consisting of 10,000 yearbooks, came from high schools, junior highs, academies, colleges, and universities—military, public, parochial, and private.  The collection covers almost every state in the United States and spans over 100 years (1875-1988).

So, for anyone interested in discovering their ancestors in the new yearbook collection, visit www.ancestry.com/yearbook to search the full collection of 60 million records.

Once you have found your ancestor in a yearbook, keep your eyes open for class histories, nicknames, statement of aspirations and involvement in clubs and other activities. The U.S. School Yearbook collection gives an amazing opportunity to find out new things about your ancestors.

Have you been watching the encore episodes of  the TV show Who Do You Think You Are? that have aired recently? During the past couple of weeks, it’s been moving to relive Lisa Kudrow return to the place where members of her family had been murdered in the Holocaust, and exciting to see Sarah Jessica Parker make connections to a gold miner and an accused witch.

And within both of their stories, we are able to take away something that we can apply to our own family history research.

For example, if you wanted to start searching to see if any of your ancestors were part of the original gold miners, then you should check the 1850 U.S. Federal Census for California to see if your ancestors were Forty-Niners.

Or if you have a more complex family history line, like Lisa Kudrow, you can find experts to answer questions, research records, pick up documents, take photos, translate papers, or tackle full research projects through the Ancestry.com Hire an Expert tab.

For more details about both episodes, check out our original blog posts for Lisa Kudrow and Sarah Jessica Parker that spell out the particulars about each episode and other tips and tricks that could be helpful in your own family history research.

Don’t miss the next two weeks where NBC will be airing the journeys of Emmitt Smith and Brooke Shields. Tune in Friday August 27th at 8/7c to see Emmitt learn of his African roots, and the following week where Brooke Shields discovers her family comes from two different worlds.

And then let us know your family history research experience. What family history tips have you gathered from watching the series Who Do You Think You Are?

The Ancestry.com Family Tree Service will undergo scheduled maintenance Wednesday for about 3 hours beginning at 12:01 AM Mountain Time. (6:01 AM GMT, 2:01 AM Eastern, 1:01 AM Central, 11:01 PM Pacific) 

During this time Ancestry Member Trees, OneWorldTree, some portions of My Canvas, the sections of the Home Page that are related to Member Trees, and the sections of MyFamily.com that are related to Member Trees will be unavailable. 

S.S. Angelo (Wilson Line steamship) leaving Christiana, Norway, with emigrants for America

Coming to America: Finding Your Immigrant Ancestors
Wednesday, 01 September 2010, 8:00 PM Eastern (New York)

 Your immigrant ancestor’s trip to America is among the most compelling chapters in your family history. Join me September 1st for a free online class to learn what you need to know to identify your ancestor in passenger arrival records. We’ll discuss places you can find the details you need, and how to discover the story of your ancestor’s voyage to America in the records you find.

We’ll have a brief Q&A session following the presentation, and then we’ll move the conversation over to our Facebook page to continue the conversation for a bit more.

Click here for your free registration.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be making a number of changes to the new search forms. We hope to make searches more flexible, and in response to your feedback we have improved some searches that were hard to do. You can get a sneak preview of some of these at the search update guided tour which you can find at Tour of Upcoming Changes.

This week, we’ve launched the first of these changes to the forms, which provides some new ways to enter details of family members into your search.

There are two main differences:

1. We’ve split the names from just one name box into two, supporting first name and last name.  This can be really important if you’re searching for a marriage record and don’t know the maiden name of the spouse.
2. We’ve added in the ability to simply add more relationships based on what you know, for example if you know multiple siblings – this helps to quickly create a really powerful search query.

One more thing. If you are using advanced search we’ll also allow you to select exact for either the first or last name of a mother or a father.

To find this, you need to click the “Tell us more to get better results” link at the bottom of the search form

If you click on that link, you will see under “Lived In (Residence) and Marriage Info, the Family Member section:

You will see that you can choose from Father, Mother, Spouse, Child or Sibling. To add more than one, click the “Add Row” box.

If you are in advanced search, you also can choose Exact Only on Father or Mother. Remember if you choose exact only, the record must have that value — so if a record doesn’t have a Father in it and you choose it as exact, then we won’t return it.

You will also find this update on all family member areas on category and data collection forms.
Vital Records

Vital Records often have wonderful relationship data in them — specifying family members in your search query will help us narrow down the results we give you.

Lets say you have one of those common ancestor names, William Smith, and you are trying to find out who he married. You start at the Birth, Marriage and Death form and you are in the advanced form, because you like to take advantage of our name filters.

You enter William as a first name, and set the filters to “exact, phonetic, similiar and initials” because you know William has a lot of variations.

You enter Smith as a last name, and set the filters to “exact, phonetic, and similiar”.

You also know that Williams father was named John and his mother’s name was Mary. So you scroll down to where you enter Family Members and enter that information. I recommend that you do not start with exact, you never know which pieces of information are recorded or indexed for family members and it’s a good idea to start with using this information as a way for us to rank records instead of excluding records.

Press “Search” and you’ll see records from everywhere, and over 800,000!

It’s a good time to refine your search and take advantage of our location filter. Press “r” on your keyboard for “refine search”, and let’s say you know William was probably married in Ohio..use the type ahead and start typing ohio:

Select Ohio, USA, then click on “Use default settings” and choose one of the filters, say “Restrict to this place exactly” and perform your search.

Now you have 83 records to look at, which is probably easier to handle. And if you want to drill down to Marriage records, click on the “Marriage & Divorce” link on the right and that is what we shall select for you to look at.

One important caveat here

When we used to search family members, we didn’t search last names, just first and middle names. So we are in the process of indexing all the family member last names on the site. We have over 4 billion records, so it may take us a week or two to get caught up. So if you type in a last name and choose exact and get no results, it means we haven’t indexed family member last names on that collection yet. I’ll let you know when we are caught up.

Happy Searching!

AUTHORED BY RUSSELL JAMES (FROM ANCESTRY.CO.UK)

Ancestry.co.uk’s biggest release of the year officially went online. The National Probate Calendar will help you uncover details of your ancestors’ wealth, social standing and even their hobbies and interests, plus point you in the direction of further family members. It’s now available for everyone to search online for the first time.

We’ve put together a complete guide to using this comprehensive collection, complete with step-by-step instructions. However, I’ll sum up why it’s so important here.

Every time a person dies, a court appoints someone to distribute their property. This process is called probate, and since 1858 it has been the sole responsibility of the Principal Probate Registry.

For many years, the Registry kept summaries of all its cases in calendars. These calendars, for most years between 1861 and 1941, are the records that you can now search at our site. This means there’s an entry for the vast majority of people who died in that period.

Find an ancestor in these records, and you’ll discover their full name, their date and place of death, and the executor of their will – often another family member. Crucially, you’ll also find the value of their estate, revealing whether your family lived in luxury or squalor.

That’s not all. Once you’ve pinpointed a member of your family in the Calendar, you can use its information to order copies of all their other probate records, usually including a will, direct from the Probate Office. Find out more.

We’ll be interested to hear how you get on with the records – please let us know in the comments below. I found three of my ancestors within five minutes of logging on this morning – I’m now trying to work out where all the money listed in their wills has disappeared to!

Make a date to meet generations of your family at 
Boston Family History Day 2010 – Saturday, October 16, 2010
Brought to you by Ancestry.com and the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS)

Register today for this exciting event, which will include a full day of classes, family history, and of course Ancestry.com experts on hand to answer your questions.

Family History Classes
Choose from more than a dozen classes to get pro tips and guidance from the experts at NEHGS and Ancestry.com. Class topics will include something for every family historian:

• Getting the most from your Ancestry.com
• Researching your New England ancestors
• Discovering NEHGS family history resources
• Getting started in family history
• Finding your family in immigration records
• And much more!

Have New England ancestors, but you hail from somewhere else? Boston Family History Day is a great reason to head back to your ancestral home – learn new tips on researching ancestors’ lives, discover unparalleled New England resources provided by NEHGS  . . . and take in Boston’s beautiful fall foliage.

One-on-One Consultations
Sit down with professional genealogists from NEHGS who can help you outline resources for getting started, breaking through brick-walls, specific ethnic or geographic problems, and more.

Document and Photo Scanning 
Have your family photos and historical documents scanned – for free – on professional scanning equipment provided by Ancestry.com. It’s a unique opportunity to have your family history records digitized!

Learn more about Boston Family History Day 2010 at www.FamilyHistoryDay.com.

As you may have already heard, NBC is planning to re-air four episodes of the TV show Who Do You Think You Are? starting on Friday, August 13 at 8/7c.

As a sponsor of NBC during the show, we wanted to make sure that you didn’t miss this Friday night affair, where you can expect to see the repeated episodes that feature Lisa Kudrow, Sarah Jessica Parker, Emmitt Smith and Brooke Shields.

As many of you know, the idea for Who Do You Think You Are? originated from a show that has been phenomenally successful in the United Kingdom for several years. Brought to the United States this past March by executive producer, Lisa Kudrow, the series had more than 6 million people tune in each week to NBC to watch the show.

And now we are lucky enough to have four of the episodes replayed from August 13 until September 3.

For those of you who may have missed a few episodes of this family history-focused series, now’s your chance to experience it. You’ll see the celebrities take an amazing voyage to discover more about the ancestors who came before them. Or maybe you’ve already seen all the episodes. If that’s the case, it will still be worth the time to pop some popcorn and sit back to relive the heart-warming journeys that each of the celebrities experienced.

So let your friends and family know about the Who Do You Think You Are? reruns and get ready to relive each episode on Friday nights at 8/7c starting August 13.

This post is just a quick heads-up to let you know about a few million Midwestern records that have gone live on Ancestry.com over the last week.

Ohio Online

Ohio is the big winner, with indexes to more than 10 million vital records.

Ohio Deaths, 1908–1932, 1938–1944, and 1958–2007, has been updated with an additional 550,000 names, but the bigger news is two new databases: Ohio Marriage Index, 1970, 1972–2007, and Ohio Divorce Index, 1962–1963, 1967–1971, 1973–2007. They’re on the modern side of our record collections, for sure, but they provide access to more than 10 million records between them. And while I have no ties to Ohio that I know of, I can’t help but think these records could hold some intriguing clues for those who do.

This is especially true of the divorce index. While some entries provide less information than others, the most extensive can include  not only names and dates but also times married, birth years, number of minor children, the grounds for divorce, whom the decree was granted to, and the length of the marriage.

Michigan Death Certificates

For a little icing on the cake for those of you with relatives next door, Michigan Death Records, 1897–1920, contains almost 1 million death certificates from the state of Michigan’s Division of Vital Statistics. The records are great sources of vital information, including names and birthplaces of the deceased’s parents.

Ellen Wilson

A Michigan native clued me in on one great story from the death records. In 1850, Ellen Wilson and her husband, both slaves, passed through Michigan on their way to freedom in Canada. They returned a few years later to live among the peace-loving Quakers in Farmington, where Ellen died in 1915 (though there appear to be a couple of confusing sixes penciled in). Her death certificate gives her father’s name—a great find for anyone researching slave ancestry.

So, all you lucky folks with Ohio and Michigan roots (or branches), enjoy.

UPDATE AS OF AUGUST 12, 2010

After the success that some folks already had with them, you may have noticed that the Michigan Death Records are currently unavailable. We apologize for this inconvenience. Please know that we are working hard to get them back up on the site and hope to have the situation resolved soon. In the meantime, if you’re researching your Michigan ancestors, go to the Card Catalog and type Michigan in the Title box, and you will see more than 300 Michigan-related databases in our collections.  Or you might find these Michigan death or marriage (prior to 1850 and 1851–75) databases useful if you haven’t checked them before.

We’ll let you know as soon as we get the Michigan vital records back up.

I recently found a death index entry for an infant that bore the unique surname of my great-grandfather. I didn’t want to add the infant to a specific family because I wasn’t certain that they were related. But I also didn’t want to lose the information in case I discovered a relationship with the baby at a later time. In these cases, you can add the individual to your tree without linking them to anyone.

Months later when I was able to view the actual death certificate, I learned that this baby was indeed one of my great-grandfather’s children. Because I had already added this infant to my tree, it was easy to simply link her to her parents.

Have you had similar experiences finding individuals whom you can’t make fit in your tree yet? Do you usually find that these “unrelated” individuals do belong in your tree? Feel free to share tips on how you handle the mystery people in your tree.

To add an unrelated individual to your tree:

1. Click the People button on the main toolbar.

2. Click Person>Add Person>Add Unrelated Person.

3. Enter the person’s name (first name, middle name, and last name).

4. Choose a gender from the drop-down list and click OK. The new individual becomes the focus of the pedigree view and editing panel.

Note: Because the individual isn’t connected to anyone else in your tree, you can navigate to him or her by clicking his or her name in the index on the People workspace.

To attach an unrelated individual to a family:

1. Go to the People workspace and select the individual you want to attach to a family.
2. Click Person>Attach/Detach Person>Attach Father/Mother.
3. Select the name of the father or mother you want to attach the individual to. Then click OK.
4. If prompted, choose which family you want the individual attached to. Then click OK.

It’s always fun to find records about your ancestors. It’s even more exciting to discover records that you never knew existed. But how do you find these records when you didn’t even know to look for them?

Here’s where the Ancestry.com community can help you. Ever notice the Member Connect panel when you’re looking at a record image? We show you other members who have saved the record you’re viewing to their tree so that you can check out their research and contact them.

Last night we released an enhancement to the Member Connect panel. If members have saved the record you’re viewing to someone in their tree, we’ll now show you other records they have saved to the same person in their tree. We show you both the name of the record and how many people have saved it to their tree. Look through the list of records saved by the other members and you may discover an elusive record you could never find– or never thought to look for.

Don’t see other records?

If no one else has saved the record you’re viewing or no one else has saved other records for this person to their tree, then this new section won’t appear in the Member Connect panel.

If you don’t see the Member Connect panel on the page, it’s likely because you have it collapsed. You can open the panel by clicking on the arrow button on the right side of the screen.

Occasionally you may find that you’ve duplicated the names of locations in your tree. This might be because you ignore a place warning for a location or you’ve named one location differently. In Family Tree Maker 2009 and 2010, you can merge two locations together. That way you won’t lose the facts associated with either location.

1. Go to the Places workspace.
2. In the Places list, select the place you want to replace.

3. Right-click the name and choose Replace with Other Place Name (in 2009 the option is called Merge with Other Place). The Index of Places window opens.

4. Select the name you want to keep and click OK.

TIP: If you can’t remember which location you chose first, don’t worry. If you click on the wrong location, the OK button won’t be enabled.

Let’s be honest. When we’re researching our family history, there are always more places to check. The records of our ancestors’ lives don’t rise and set with the census, do they? I know that for me, one of the problems I run into is simply not knowing where to look.

For example, my Russian great grandfather didn’t immigrate until 1917, so I exhausted census and immigration records for him pretty quickly.

Then, while looking for something in The Source for work, I found myself browsing the newspaper chapter. I’d never thought much about newspapers; it seemed like such a long shot that any of my people would be listed. But The Source opened my eyes to historical newspapers and showed me ways my great grandfather could indeed be found there.

As it happens, Ancestry.com had just added the Greeley Daily Tribune, the very paper I needed. So, following the guidance of The Source, I searched and sure enough, I found him. Of course, most of the listings were notices that he’d been fined for breaking the law (burning trash), but here was something about my ancestor I would never have found without broadening my horizons.

Since it’s based on The Source and Red Book, the Ancestry.com Family History Wiki is all about helping you broaden your horizons. It’s about helping you find new places to look and about helping you make better use of your current strategies.

So what are you working on right now? Have you checked the wiki to see if it can offer any help?

We don’t have articles on everything (yet!), but there’s a lot there, just waiting to help. For now, our content is focused mainly on record types and locality searches. Below, I’ve linked to some good places to start browsing. Or, you can type a topic in the main search box on the left side of the wiki.

I’d love to hear what you find. In the comments, let me know if you found anything interesting or useful. And more importantly, let me know if you didn’t find anything. That way we can know better where to focus our efforts.

Places to Start

• Browse through articles about record types
• Learn more about research in a specific state
• Explore our county pages
• Try a random page and be surprised

Happy family history.