Sunday, November 26, 2006

Free "Family Facts" on Ancestry.com

I posted two weeks ago about the "Our Name in History" books sold by Ancestry.com, and Dick Eastman posted a note last week about the books. One of his readers (Nathan Murphy) noted that the "Family Facts" section of the Ancestry books came from Ancestry's databases, and the facts can be generated for 200,000 surnames by anyone at http://www.ancestry.com/learn/ (and click on the link under "Family Facts" on the page).

On the "Family Facts" page, you can input a surname, and find out the:

1) the numbers of and names of Civil War soldiers
2) the number of immigrants by year for 1851 to 1891 from the NY Passenger Lists
3) life expectancy from 1945 to 2005 from the SSDI
4) surname distribution in England and Wales by county in 1891
5) surname distribution in the US by state for 1840, 1880 and 1920
6) name meanings for a given name and a surname
7) newspaper headlines from a certain decade - with a link for the surname in Ancestry's Historical Newspaper collection
8) top occupations from the 1880 US census
9) place of origin for the surname from the NY Passenger Lists
10) ports of departure for the surname from the NY Passenger lists

If you have an interest in these things, you can check out the different Family Facts for your surnames, but you will need an Ancestry subscription to see the actual records. I will probably use some of this information in my family newsletter.

1 comment:

Steve Danko said...

I tried out the "Family Facts" for the Niedzialkowski surname (the ancestral surname for which I have the the greatest amount of genealogical information). The only surname information reported by Family Facts was Surname Distribution in the 1920 Census: 1 in Pennsylvania, 2 in Ohio and Missouri, and 3 in Wisconsin.

It looks like Family Facts missed the information on all of the Massachusetts Niedzialkowskis to whom I'm related.