New Search versus Old Search on ancestry.com

Some time ago ancestry.com changed its default search engine from "Old Search" to "New Search". While New Search was meant to be an improvement, in fact it is rather annoying and more cumbersome to use than Old Search. Anecdotal reports from several mail lists that we subscribe to suggest that this feeling is widespread. Given that searching effectively is critical to finding people in ancestry records, I thought it was worth a closer examination of the differences between these two search engines.


Both searches allow you to tick a box that returns exact matches only. This is useful because you can use wildcards to control your search results; for example, if you know your KIRBY ancestors might have spelled their name KERBY, you can ask for K*rby. This is useful when looking for Harr*t (Harriet; Harriett, Harriot, etc) or War*sk? (Warchinski; Warchinsky; Warshinski, etc) or other such variants. 


However, New Search does not allow you the same flexibility with use of wildcards in locations. This is often a useful feature because spellings were so variable in the 19th and earlier centuries. For example, if you are looking for someone born in Pipewell, Northamptonshire on the 1871 census and you use New Search, it fails to recognize Pipewell as a place. Using Pip* fares no better. It does however suggest:

• Pipestone County, Minnesota, USA
• Pipestem, Summers, West Virginia, USA
• Pipestem Valley, Stutsman, North Dakota, USA
• Pipestone, Berrien, Michigan, USA
• Pipestone, Manitoba, Canada
• Pipetorp, Kalmar, Sweden
• Pipe, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia
• Pipe, Braga, Portugal
• Pipe Creek, Madison, Indiana, USA
• Pipe Creek, Bandera, Texas, USA
• Pipe Ridware, Staffordshire, England
• Pipe Springs, Bent, Colorado, USA
• Pipea, Mures, Romania
• Pipeira, Evora, Portugal
• Pipeiras, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

even though you are searching the UK census. 

Old Search is much more straightforward for this - you can put Pip* in as place of birth and it will give you hits for Pipewell or any other place starting with Pip.

Another thing we don't like about New Search is that you have to click back a page if you get no results in order to re-search. On Old Search, the search box remains at the bottom of the page even when there are no hits, so you are not continually clicking back and waiting for the page to reload.

We continue to use Old Search because it is more efficient and we find it faster than New Search. In fact, we can't see why ancestry changed it. If you want to compare New and Old Searches for yourself, look for the small "Go to Old Search" link at the top right of the default New Search page - ancestry appears to be discouraging us from using this option by practically hiding it from view.

There must be some family historians who prefer New Search - are you one of them? If so please comment and tell us why you like it better. And if there are other important differences please let us know! 

Genealogy Message Boards - two favourites

The genealogy community is absolutely wonderful in its helpfulness - there are people all over the world POISED to help you find your long-lost ancestor! I'm talking about Message Boards.

Message Boards are places where you can post questions about all sorts of family history questions: queries about geography, surnames, village names, family trees, and more. If your are looking for other people interested in the surname TREGOWETH (and I am) there is a Tregoweth message board. If you live in Canada but are searching for ancestors in Australia, there are people on message boards who will look up records for you or even go out to cemeteries and take pictures of headstones. If you have questions about genealogy software or where to search next, there are many experienced people who will offer advice. If you have a brick wall and need someone to look at it with a fresh eye, you're in luck. Post your question to a Message Board and you may well get an answer before you've made yourself a cup of tea.

My two favourite message boards are those on rootsweb and on RootsChat. Both of these free sites have an enormous variety of boards organized by topic so that you can post your query to the one most likely to find you an answer. Both are also widely used and very popular so you have a good chance of getting a response. There are lots of other places to post questions, but I suggest these as your starting point.

When you post a question, there are a few tips that make it easier for people to help you. Put the surnames in UPPER CASE. Don't put anything else in upper case though - IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE SHOUTING! Try to be clear about what you already know and remember that names, dates, and places are key. It's important to point out what your questions are, and where you've already looked. People don't like to go out of their way to look things up only to find that you already had that information. Be sparing in requests for free look-ups on sites that other people are paying to use, like ancestry or findmypast. Make sure your question is posted to the right board. And finally, offer help yourself whenever you can.

Looking for military history on Ancestry

In the last post we looked at searching the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website. Another excellent source for military service records is Ancestry. If you are lucky, your search will turn up a wealth of information. Here is an example, using my cousin twice removed, Robert Harry WALTERS.


I knew from census data that Robert Harry was born around 1882 in Birmingham. The 1891 census had given Robert's name as  "Robert H. W., while in 1901 he was listed as "Harry".FreeBMD confirmed that his name was indeed "Robert Harry" in the birth registration in the June 1882 quarter in the Birmingham Registration District. In the 1911 census, Robert is listed by both names and lives with his wife Florence Ada and his son Robert Harry in Leicester at 185 Humberstone Rd.


Because of Robert's age I thought it likely that he would have served in World War I so I searched the WWI Military Service Records on Ancestry (you have to have a paid subscription to see the details). I was rewarded with 22 images covering the records of Robert Harry WALTERS born about 1882 of 35 Manington Street.


The original images of Robert's service record show that he signed up in 1915 as a 33 year-old. At that time he was 5 feet 7 inches tall, weighed just 125 pounds and had a 33 1/2-inch chest. His physical development was listed as "fair". He had been vaccinated in infancy. He had several moles, and under the heading "Slight defects but not sufficient to cause rejection" he was described as having stiff big toes. Not an outstanding physical specimen, but good enough for the army where he joined the Bedfordshire Regiment at the rank of Private.

His wife Florence is given as next-of-kin, and it lists her maiden name (PINSENT) and the date and place of their marriage (12 April 1909, 35 Mornington St., Leicester - note the mistranscription by Ancestry of Mornington as Manington). It also shows Robert and Ada as having three children and gives their birthdates - useful! Their son Robert Harry had two brothers: James Arthur and Horace.


Robert was wounded twice in action in France in 1917, injuring his arm and face. There are more details of minor events in his army career, and it appears that everything in his file was included in the imaging because it contains blank pieces of paper as well as the actual records. Robert Harry was one of the lucky ones - his injuries were not too severe and his record is otherwise uneventful. He survived the war and was demobilized in 1919.

The military service records are very informative; sometimes there are pages of details that tell you all kinds of things. You might find that your ancestor was drunk and disorderly and prone to all sorts of bad behaviour! The service records will also give you the regimental number and this is useful if you have someone with a common last name - if you happen to know the number already you can pin down the right record on Ancestry. Having the number makes it easier to check the British Army WWI Medal Rolls Index Cards. These are another source of information available on Ancestry - Robert's shows nothing other than the Victory Medal and the British Medal (these were given to everyone).

After the war, Robert and his family stayed in Leicester. I have traced the descendants of his son Robert into the 1990's - still in Leicester.

Search tips for using Ancestry to find census details

One of the most useful sites you have to pay for is Ancestry. Ancestry has all kinds of records for England (and other parts of the world). In this post we'll talk about how to use the ancestry search engine. You can find Ancestry at ancestry.com, ancestry.ca, or ancestry.co.uk - it is all the same company.

As with FamilySearch, Ancestry has both "old" and "new" user interfaces. We prefer the Old Search for Ancestry because you can use wildcards in the placename when searching census records, etc. Also you can search more efficiently because you are able to refine the search without going back - in New Search you have to go to another page to refine your search and this takes longer and is annoying.

You can use Ancestry without being a paid subscriber but you won't be able to see the details of the results or the original images (except for a few free databases such as the 1881 census). You can use Ancestry for free at either Gibsons or Sechelt public libraries - unfortunately you have to be in the library to do this.

When searching on Ancestry you can search all of the records at once or one database at a time. We prefer to search one database at a time, and usually open one browser tab for the 1841 census, one for the 1851 census, and so on. This allows you to move easily back and forward through time while following the same family. Ancestry has census taken in England from 1841 to 1901 (one every 10 years).

When searching in the census databases, you have the option to put several bits of information into the search: names, birthplaces, place of residence, approximate birth year and so on. We like to tick the box for "Exact Search" because you have more control over the information you are specifying in the search and you get fewer irrelevant results.

If your initial search for a specific person does not turn up what you are looking for, start removing information from the search. For example, leave out the parish and just include the county - sometimes people listed their birthplace as the parish near to the one where you think they should have been born. Broaden the range for birthyear in case the age is not quite right. Leave out either the first name or last name. Use wildcards for names in case there are variations in spelling. For example, I have seen Walters spelt or mistranscribed as Watters, Wallers, Walter, Wauters, Walltres, etc - if you use W*l*t*r* as your search or even Wal*, you will get a lot more hits to look through but you will be more likely to capture wild or incorrect spelling. Also, do remember that historically, spelling has been very flexible and you cannot assume that how you spell a name now is how it was always spelt. Look for phonetic spelling! When you can't find someone it's often because the names were mangled by the enumerator and/or the transcriber.

When you are an Ancestry subscriber you can see the image of the original census pages and therefore can check the spelling for yourself if a result seems promising. (You can save a copy of the image to your computer as well.) As a last resort, put minimal name information in - e.g., search for Har* Wal* when looking for a Harriett Walters, and then look for names in the results list that must have been mistranscribed such as Harnet Waltus. You can then check the original yourself.

If you can't find the person you are seeking, try searching for another family member, especially a sibling with a more unusual name. You can also leave names out completely and search for anyone born in the parish you're looking for, born within a particular time frame (or just use a first name). Of course this tactic doesn't work for larger towns and cities because you may have thousands of hits to scroll through. Or - leave out the location altogether and search by name - again this is probably only an option when the names are not extremely common.

Finally, if you can't find someone in a census, look for the family in the census before or after. And remember that when there are 10-year old children in the family, that is a good clue to where the family was 10 years earlier.

In another post I'll talk about searching in the 1911 census. If you have any tips to add, or any comments, please let us know!

Looking for civil records using FreeBMD

FreeBMD contains the indexes to the civil registrations of Births, Marriages and Deaths in England and Wales from 1837. Coverage is excellent into the 20^th century – more recent records are being added (transcriptions done by volunteers). 

You can restrict a search to a particular registration district or county. If your search does not produce what you are looking for, try entering minimal information in the search boxes - perhaps just names and county and a broad time period, or just surnames without first names. The image above is an example of a search for a marriage of an Alice CURTIS in the Dec quarter of 1933 to the September quarter of 1934, without specifying any other information in the search.

After 1866 the age at death was recorded so this is useful in nailing down the birth year.

Unfortunately the indexes after about 1911 do not show middle names in full, just initials, so searching for someone with a middle name won't produce any hits for records after this period. In this case, you can still find middle initials, so for example, if you were looking for a death of a Robert John MacAdam,  you could search for Robert J* MacAdam and that would find the Robert J's after 1911 and the Robert John's before 1911.

After 1912 the mother's maiden name was shown in the birth index, so you can use this when searching to find siblings of your ancestor by entering just the surname and the mother's maiden name.

If you think something may have been mistranscribed, you can view the original image of the index page by clicking on the eyeglasses icon.

You can search the same indexes that FreeBMD covers on ancestry.com - ancestry's coverage goes into 2005 or so (FreeBMD is only currently into the 1940s so ancestry is better for living people), but is not quite as flexible in its use of wildcards. After 1969, the death indexes include the date of birth - currently this is only available using ancestry.