Unofficial Guide to Ancestry.com: How to Find Your Family History on the #1 Genealogy Website - Softcover

Hendrickson, Nancy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1440353263 ISBN 13: 9781440353260

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Master the world’s #1 Genealogy Website

Discover the secrets to Ancestry.com success! This book, newly revised and expanded, will help you get the most out of your Ancestry.com subscription.  Inside, you’ll discover how to take advantage of what the world’s biggest genealogy website has to offer—and how to find answers to your genealogy questions within its billions of records and millions of AncestryDNA profiles.  Each chapter includes step-by-step examples with illustrations to show you exactly how to apply search techniques to your genealogy. A new section on AncestryDNA will also help you understand and analyze your DNA test results.

What you'll learn:
* Timesaving tips for uncovering specific records, time periods and topics using Ancestry.com’s search forms and Card Catalog
* Details on Ancestry.com's historical record collections, including what you can expect to find in them
* Step-by-step guides for creating and managing your family tree on Ancestry.com, plus how to connect with other users and utilize the site’s powerful Hint system
* Plain-language strategies for using your AncestryDNA results, including guides to your ethnicity report and DNA matches

Whether you've just begun dabbling in family history or you're a longtime Ancestry.com subscriber, this book will turn you into an Ancestry.com power user!

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nancy Hendrickson is an Internet genealogy expert who has been interviewed on the subject in national publications including the New York Times, Kiplinger's, and Better Homes and Gardens. She has written several best-selling ebooks in the genealogy category of the Kindle store on Amazon.com, including 101 of the Best Free Websites for Climbing Your Family Tree.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Unofficial Guide to Ancestry.com

How to Find Your Family History on the #1 Genealogy Website

By Nancy Hendrickson

F+W Media, Inc.

Copyright © 2018 Nancy Hendrickson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4403-5326-0

Contents

Introduction, 6, 
PART ONE: GETTING STARTED WITH ANCESTRY.COM, 
CHAPTER 1 LEARNING THE BASICS, 9, 
CHAPTER 2 USING ANCESTRY.COM FAMILY TREES, 24, 
CHAPTER 3 MASTERING SEARCH AND THE CARD CATALOG, 40, 
PART TWO: DIGGING INTO RECORDS ON ANCESTRY.COM, 
CHAPTER 4 MAKING THE MOST OF CENSUS RECORDS AND VOTER LISTS, 67, 
CHAPTER 5 DELVING INTO BIRTH, MARRIAGE, AND DEATH RECORDS, 84, 
CHAPTER 6 WORKING WITH MILITARY RECORDS, 97, 
CHAPTER 7 USING IMMIGRATION AND TRAVEL RECORDS, 113, 
CHAPTER 8 DIGGING INTO NEWSPAPERS, PUBLICATIONS, AND MAPS, 128, 
CHAPTER 9 SEARCHING STORIES, MEMORIES, HISTORIES, AND PICTURES, 142, 
CHAPTER 10 MAKING THE MOST OF SCHOOLS, DIRECTORIES, AND CHURCH HISTORIES, 164, 
CHAPTER 11 USING THE WILLS, PROBATES, LAND, TAX & CRIMINAL CATEGORY, 180, 
PART THREE: UNCOVERING ANCESTORS WITH ANCESTRYDNA, 
CHAPTER 12 INTERPRETING YOUR DNA RESULTS, 197, 
CHAPTER 13 CONNECTING WITH OTHERS, 213, 
CHAPTER 14 APPLYING DNA TO YOUR RESEARCH, 223, 
PART FOUR: DIVING DEEPER INTO ANCESTRY.COM, 
CHAPTER 15 COLLABORATING WITH OTHER USERS, 235, 
CHAPTER 16 BRANCHING OUT WITH NEWSPAPERS.COM AND FOLD3, 249, 
Appendix: Quick Links and Shortcut Keys, 263, 
Index, 265, 

CHAPTER 1

LEARNING THE BASICS

Everyone has his or her own reasons for climbing the family tree. For some, it may provide the proof needed to join a lineage society like the Daughters of the American Revolution. But for others, it may be a case of simple curiosity: Who came before me?

What did they do? And how am I like them?

Back in the day, learning anything about your family's place in history required a visit to a national archive, state or local government office, or family history library. You'd spend hours cranking through reels and reels of microfilm, all with the hope (but not the promise) of locating someone in your family tree. Thanks to the Internet — and one website in particular — all of that has changed.

The evolution of digital genealogy is nothing less than miraculous. Over the last several years, there's been an explosion of genealogy records online, thanks in part to individuals, organizations, state agencies, societies, and countless volunteers. However, no one has amassed as large of a collection as Ancestry.com . With fourteen billion records, it's now the world's largest online family history resource. If you want the hope (and, by some measures, the promise) of finding your ancestors' records, Ancestry.com is the place to start — and this book will show you how.

This chapter will introduce you to Ancestry.com's many services, membership options, and the basics of Ancestry.com's family trees and records system. Even if you already have an Ancestry.com subscription, I encourage you to start with chapter 1. You never know what tip might take you onto unexplored paths. In later chapters, I'll cover how to maximize your Ancestry.com membership and dig deep into the many types of records available on the site.

THE ANCESTRY.COM NETWORK

One thing that makes Ancestry.com so valuable to genealogists is its exceptionally large network of genealogy-related websites. Some are linked into Ancestry.com's site via the main navigation menu while others are stand-alone entities. Ancestry.com's holdings as of print time are:

• AncestryDNA

• Archives.com

• Find A Grave

• Fold3

• Genealogy.com

• Newspapers.com

• ProGenealogists

• RootsWeb

We'll discuss AncestryDNA in chapters 12 through 14, and Newspapers.com and Fold3 in chapter 16.

MEMBERSHIPS Membership to Ancestry.com provides access to numerous collections and databases where you can find census, vital, military, and immigration records, as well as other members' online family trees.

If you don't yet have an Ancestry.com membership, you can join at four different membership levels:

1. Ancestry Member: free registration that allows you to build a family tree, use message boards, search, and access free records

2. U.S. Discovery: includes all US records

3. World Explorer: includes all US and international records

4. All Access: includes both US and international records in addition to Newspapers. com (150 million pages of newspaper archives) and Fold3 (450 million military records).

Your choice of membership depends on the type of research in which you're primarily interested. If you haven't yet traced your ancestors back to their immigration to the United States, the US membership is a good starting place for you.

For researchers whose family were fairly recent immigrants to America (i.e., they came to America in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries), the World Explorer membership can help pinpoint your family's country of origin via international records such as censuses, church, birth, death, and marriage records. The number of international records on Ancestry.com is growing, with more added as they become available. Remember, some countries have no central depository (like the United States' National Archives ), so those records have to be digitized by local archives.

Lastly, for researchers primarily interested in discovering military records or family information in old newspapers, the expanded All Access membership may be just the ticket. With some records (including military records), you'll find a link to Fold3's digitized version of the original record alongside its indexed information on Ancestry.com. For example, I found a Revolutionary War ancestor in an Ancestry.com index but needed to go to Fold3 to read the entire pension file. (Note: If the only thing you're interested in is your family's military history, you can subscribe to Fold3 without an Ancestry.com membership.)

Before we detail the many features of Ancestry.com, remember that some portions of the Ancestry.com site are available to anyone, whether or not you have a subscription. If you want to join as a free user, surf the site all you'd like. Any time you come to a record that's subscription-only, you'll see a pop-up box inviting you to join on a trial basis.

GETTING STARTED IN FAMILY TREE RESEARCH

If your only acquaintance with climbing the family tree is watching programs like Who Do You Think You Are? or Genealogy Roadshow, you may not know that genealogy research begins with you!

If your family lore is built around a distant relationship to Queen Elizabeth I, Jesse James, or Pocahontas, it's tempting to start research with your famous ancestor and then work your way backward to yourself. This approach can be disastrous, not to mention a waste of time. Your family legend might be based more on fiction than fact. The good news is that, if you are related to a famous person, you'll eventually find the connection based on research and evidence.

Although starting with yourself may seem counterintuitive, it's the best way to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1440353263
• ISBN 13: 9781440353260
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Terminal Video; n.pederzini@terminaldistribuzione.com; ; Via Bruno Buozzi, 24/26,; Granarolo dell'Emilia BO,; Italien