7:00 PM: Ancestry Today

1
700 PM Ancestry Today

• A talk about Ancestry.com content

2
Ancestry Today

• What is online,
• how to use it and
• whats new within the last few months

3
Good news / bad news

• Every issue about ancestry is a mixed bag
• If youre a glass is half empty guy you wont
  like them

4
MyFamily.com

• Soon to be Heritas.
• Ancestry.com
• Genealogy.com
• MyFamily.com (the website)
• Rootsweb.com
• And lots of things like ourfamilyhistory.com

5
A Tale of Two Islands
Ancestry Island
Census
Business Practices
Vital Records
Search
Military
Trees
Immigration
Message Boards
Methods
Genealogy Island
6
A Bit about how Ancestry works
Board of Directors
Ads on the site
Sr Management
Product Mgmt
Marketing
Development
Guys who design pages
Guys who talk to customers
7
Basic User Experience
Google or affiliate link
Landing Page / Search Template
Search result list
Pay Wall
Single Record Page
Image (where available)
8
Whats online

• The best census collection anywhere
• Immigration
• Military
• Other record types
• User content
• SSDI Comments

9
How to use it

• The high points on search
• Correcting the site
• Message boards

10
Whats New

• New Look
• 57
• New Tree Product
• Broader and deeper content

11
How Content is chosen

• No one knows
• Lou Szucs has asked for naturalizations for
  years, without results
• Most recent Canadian census
• Inconsistent field keying and search

12
1000 AM Getting the Most From Ancestry.com.

• Organizing, finding, and sharing information
  about your family using this site.

13
Finding

• Recent changes
• Exact Search
• Ranked Search
• Searching from a PILF
• Searching from a tree

14
Organizing

• My Ancestry
• New Tree Product
• Old Tree Product and tree strategies

15
Sharing

• Send to a friend
• Publish
• AWT / Worldconnect
• Message Boards

16
1130 AM Rootsweb The Best-Kept Secret in
Genealogy.

• Rootsweb, one of the first Internet genealogy
  sites, has not lost its luster.

17
200 PM Online Databases Fact or Fiction.

• A talk about databases the good and the bad,
  what to believe, what not to believe, where
  pitfalls lie, and discoveries out there waiting
  for you.