Getting the best from ancestry for your family history

Ancestry (www.ancestry. co.uk) is a major website resource for family historians that offers access to more than 30 billion records, many of them specific to the UK and Ireland. In addition, the site also hosts user-submitted family trees, and the results of millions of DNA tests from users across the world, allowing us to connect with distant family members across the British and Irish diaspora. However, Ancestry is also quite a beast to get to grips with, and in this article, I will discuss some of the more useful tools and research practices to get the most from it.

What’s most important on the home page?

Ancestry’s home page can be quite daunting to behold, with various panels designed to try to grab your attention, such as ‘Your daily picks’, ‘Hints about your direct relatives’, and more.

The two most important areas for researchers, however, are:

1 the main menu along the top 2 and the panels in the column to the far right of the screen.

SEARCHING MORE METHODICALLY

What’s a good way to start?

Let’s start with the records. There are two main ways to locate these:

• via a ‘lucky dip’ approach; • or by utilising a more methodical search strategy. For the ‘lucky dip’ approach, you can use the ‘Search people’ area to the top right of the home page, but click on the ‘Advanced search’ hyperlink within here to reach the site’s main ‘Search’ screen, as this provides more fields for you to help control an enquiry and search more methodically.

An advantage of this page is that a search for a person’s name can flag up possible hits from its record collections, submitted family trees, family stories, and more. However, a basic example search for a ‘John Smith’, with nothing to suggest which John Smith and where, will land you in trouble, with over 16 million hits!

How to ‘control’ your search

To use this facility properly you need to be able to control the search process