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The Search for Our Ancestry: Features on Ancestry.com

Angelo Coniglio | Mar 21, 2014, 6 a.m.

As previously noted, the subscription genealogy site Ancestry.com, hereafter referred to as Ancestry, continually adds new features and information.

Although you may not be ready to subscribe for the long term, the service does offer free 14-day trials, and it has monthly rates if you want to subscribe for short periods. Remember that the site is available for free at many public libraries and at most Mormon FamilySearch Centers (FSCs).

This column is not an endorsement of Ancestry, but I urge interested novice genealogists to try the site and draw their own conclusions.

Ancestry has online images of civil birth, marriage, and death records from many towns worldwide. In the case of many localities, it has church records as well. Finding the records that do exist online can be tricky.

One way that seems effective is to select “search” on the main Ancestry page and then on the drop-down menu that appears, select “card catalog.” Then, in the space for “title,” enter the locality that you’re interested in.

You may not find it on the first try. For example, say I want to find birth records from my ancestral town of Serradifalco in Caltanissetta province in Sicily. If I type in Serradifalco, I will get the message, “No titles matched your search criteria.”

But don’t give up. Type Sicily, and you’ll get a list of the four provinces for which Ancestry has online data, and you can then refine the search to the town, type of record, and year that you’re interested in. Searching for the province Caltanissetta would also have given positive results.

For similar searches in other countries, try searching for not only the town name, but also its parish, county, province, state, etc.

Ancestry is more user friendly than other online sources for this type of search. Many online services, in effect, post images of microfilm reels so that the user essentially scrolls through the “film” online to find the desired page. If indices (lists of records by year and individual’s name) are present, they are embedded in the film and you must scroll to the end of each year’s records, read the index, scroll back to find the record, etc.

For images available on Ancestry, indices often can be viewed separately without scrolling though an entire file of records. Of course, if you find original Italian records, they will be in Italian; German records are in German, and so on. If you find church records (even from the U.S.), they may be in Latin.

This type of record is usually not searchable by individual name: you must find the general source and then search through the records for the name of the person you are researching.

Fortunately, many Ancestry files are searchable by name. These include immigration records, such as passenger manifests and passports; military records like Navy muster rolls and World War I and II draft registration documents; and federal, and in some cases, state censuses.

Ancestry has extensive images of U.S. federal census records from 1790 through 1940. These aren’t transcriptions but images of the actual records, usually handwritten by census enumerators on preprinted forms.

A new Ancestry feature is a pop-up index at the bottom of the searched page, showing a typed transcription of the record, more easily read than the original handwriting. This feature allows you to see the original record and the transcription side by side, thus enabling you to decide for yourself if the transcription is correct.

If it isn’t, you can edit the information so that future researchers will also see your corrected information.

 

  Write to Angelo at genealogytips@aol.com or visit his website, www.bit.ly/AFCGen.
He is the author of the book The Lady of the Wheel (La Ruotaia),
based on his genealogical research of Sicilian foundlings.
For more information, see www.bit.ly/SicilianStory.

Angelo F. Coniglio's 50Plus Author's Page

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