I’ve been a subscriber to ancestry for several years. Their collection of online material is, of course, unmatched. Some of the highlights are:

• Images, fully indexed and searchable from all of the US Federal Census returns (1790-1930)
• Note that they also have a partial collection of the US mortality schedules that survive from 1850-1880. Deaths that occurred within the prior year were recorded here.
• Their online family trees, don’t overlook their Ancestry World Tree (AWT) that they phased out this past March. You can view research notes in these trees which you cannot do with their current format without permission of the tree owner.  http://www.ancestry.com/trees/awt/main.aspx
• Images and a full index of WWI US draft cards. 

Overall, I love this site, but want to review some of the issues/suggestions I have for improving it. Their switch this past March to their new family tree system; I have mixed feelings about.  Perhaps I was just used to the old AWT, but I was very disappointed when the research notes were made private in the new system.  These notes are really the cornerstone for helping you to get to original documentation and to see what someone else has already learned.  Please make them public again! I do miss having the links to the census images by year on the front page of the site as well. At any rate, I do like very much the ability to search and link images from their site to people in your tree.  This would be a key aid to creating the ultimate ancestry wiki; where you link all existing documents for a single person to a common repository for that person.

 

Their searching capability can also be improved.  I’d like to be able to search by multiple family members such as siblings or by their ages/gender; something to help deal with the dubious handwriting found in many records.  Also, perhaps there could be a search, in the event you don’t know the married name of daughters in a later census (say 1860), you could start with the 1850 info, click and it would scan future census returns to try and ID them.

It would also be perhaps useful to extrapolate information from census records 1850 and after as well as any other relevant back to 1840, 1830, and so on in an attempt to reconstruct these census returns.  Try to reconstruct the 1840 census as if it had been enumerated with every person in the family listed.  Many times, with the statistical data found in 1840 and prior, people tend to assume younger members in the household were children of the eldest male and female which is not always the case.

Here is the link to their website:  http://www.ancestry.com; they do offer a 14-day free trial.  Also, ancestry can be viewed for free at your local Family History Center as I describe here:

http://webbpat.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/genealogy-research-getting-started-2/

Otherwise, it’s $12.95/mo. for the US Deluxe package and $24.95/mo. for their World package.  You do get access to family tree information with the US Deluxe package.

Thoughts? 

Pat