In her live streamed presentation at RootsTech yesterday, Corporate Genealogist Crista Cowan shared what’s new at Ancestry, and I took notes.
During the past year, Ancestry has published 1.8 billion records, which include:
- 28.5 million records from Denmark
- 22 million church records from Mexico
- 10 million census records from the Netherlands
- 22 million birth, marriage and death records from England
- 60 million birth, marriage and death records from the United States
- 22 million new records added to FindaGrave by volunteers
New message centre
As of yesterday, all subscribers who can access Ancestry’s .com site, which means Americans and anyone, including Canadians, who subscribes to the World package, are able to see the new message centre.
The new message centre allows us to search our messages by keyword. For example, when searching for Haire within the messages (not the contacts), I saw a list of every person to whom I had sent or received a message about our possible Haire connection. I love this new feature because it reminded me of past correspondence from a few years ago that I need to review.
Also new in the message centre through the .com site is that we can now see if someone has read our message, although I’m a bit suspicious about its accuracy. When I looked, it appeared that every one of my messages has been read. I find that hard to believe.
Really?
Until now, I had assumed a lot of people I had messaged through Ancestry hadn’t read my message. Now, it appears that they have read my messages — and are just ignoring me.
Profile photo
During the past year, Ancestry updated the profile page, allowing people to personalize their own page by writing a bit about themselves and adding a photo.
To improve chances of receiving a reply to a message through Ancestry, Ms. Cowan recommends adding a profile photo. While she said a photo of yourself is probably best, even an image of your cat may help increase the number of replies you receive. She explained that a photo helps personalize your profile, and in this social media world, people are used to looking at profile photos.
Card Catalogue tip
Ms. Cowan had a quick tip for using Ancestry’s Card Catalogue that can be found under the search tab. In the Title field, enter a country, province, state, or county to see all the records available in that region.
Here’s something (else) I didn’t know. You don’t need to be signed in to an Ancestry account to see the Card Catalogue.
Recordings of RootsTech sessions
The recording of Crista Cowan’s presentation, What’s New at Ancestry, is already available online to watch for free.
Recordings of live-streamed sessions at RootsTech 2020 are posted in the video archives. They appear to be posting them within a few hours of the live presentation.
Watch the live streaming and find the schedule at rootstech.org.
