Ancestry Home Page

[meekhcs]

Morning

Does anyone know if you can customise the new homepage on Ancestry (I cannot see an obvious means to do this)? It is a little busy and cluttered for me. I know I can be a dinosaur when it comes to change but it doesn't really seem offer anything that you couldn't already get at a click of a button from the Banner.

[Mick Loney]

Sally, I’m having a break from Ancestry at the moment, so cannot really comment, but if its anything like the changes that Family Search made to their front page recently, I’d have to agree.
As they are both part of LDS, perhaps the same programmers got their hands on it. It would appear that they’ve never heard the maxim ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’

[AdrianBruce]

... As they [Ancestry and FamilySearch] are both part of LDS, perhaps the same programmers got their hands on it. ...

No the LDS do not own Ancestry....

However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the programmers went between FS and Ancestry since Ancestry has / had a Utah component.

Adrian

[Mick Loney]

Adrian,
Perhaps I got it slightly wrong about actual ownership, but Ancestry was started by two Brigham Young University (LDS) Graduates, and has/had very close ties with LDS

[AdrianBruce]

... Ancestry was started by two Brigham Young University (LDS) Graduates, and has/had very close ties with LDS

Yes, many (all?) of their images give the database citation as including "Provo, UT, USA", so I guessed there was some sort of a connection.

The big three (as far as the UK is concerned) are FamilySearch, FindMyPast and Ancestry and all three have various agreements to "sell" services and / or co-operate between each other. FamilySearch has a treasure trove of films of parish records, for instance, and, once agreements can be secured with the relevant UK Record Office, then FMP or Ancestry might use the films to expand their own offering with "payment" being provision of the indexes that they produce back to FS. That's something of a hopefully vaguely informed guess on my part since, naturally, such agreements are confidential.

If anyone thinks confidential agreements are wrong then please publish your tax records on t'Internet first!

[Mick Loney]

Adrian,
I assume you are aware that many of the FamilySearch (FS) films are now freely available on the FS site itself, providing you have registered and are logged in. A lot of these films are not yet indexed, so wouldn’t normally be of use to Ancestry or FMP, but if you don’t mind scrolling through the films yourself, they are a great asset.

e.g. Lancashire OPC site has some good transcriptions of Warrington, St Elphin, so combine that with scrolling through the FS film, the actual images can quickly be found and downloaded.

[AdrianBruce]

Adrian,
I assume you are aware that many of the FamilySearch (FS) films are now freely available on the FS site itself, providing you have registered and are logged in. ...

Yes indeed. A lot of my stuff is still blocked off, with the FS system directing you to Ancestry or FMP, but sometimes there's stuff in there that isn't blocked off, in which case it becomes a case of seeing how many balls you can keep in the air through various searches on various sites...

On trick to bear in mind is that sometimes the Parish Registers are blocked off from general access, but the equivalent Bishops' Transcripts aren't. Don't ask me why... Sometimes I think it might just be accidental!

And yes, matching indexes from elsewhere, with FS images can be very useful....