Wednesday, May 14, 2008

TGN's Tim Sullivan - Ancestry.com Update

The Generations Network press release titled "Ancestry.com Global Content, Product, and Marketing Update - May 14, 2008" by CEO Tim Sullivan was published today at http://tgn.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=121&o_iid=24018&o_lid=24018.

This is a comprehensive summary of the recent new content, their planned new content and the improvements to the "user experience" at www.ancestry.com.

The important information, for me, is about the planned new U.S. content, which includes:

* Historical newspapers – We will soon be doubling the size of our historical newspaper collection with the addition of 20 million images and over 1 billion names. In addition, within the year we will release another installment of newspapers.

* Cook County, Illinois Birth, Marriage, and Death Records (1871-1988) – This collection of vital records includes 24 million names, beginning in 1871 following the great Chicago fire.

* U.S. Yearbook Collection – 6 million names and more than 6,000 yearbooks from various schools across the United States.

* U.S. City Directories – 50 million names and 1 million images.

* Florida State Census (update) – 4 million names added to the Florida State Censuses representing the years 1867, 1875, 1935, and 1945

On the International front, they will add new content for:

* Chinese Jiapu Collection (2000 BC-1950s) – More than 1,200 Chinese family histories containing more than 2 million images in total.

* Bremen Ships Content (1815-1917) – A detailed collection of more than 20,000 birth, death, desertions, and passenger registrations, which complements the existing Bremen content in the U.S. passenger list collection.

* British Army Service Records (1914-1920) – Service records for more than 1.2 million British soldiers who fought in WWI.

* Canadian Passenger Lists (1865-1935) – 8 million names of immigrants and other travelers arriving to Quebec and other major ports during that time frame.

* French Vital Records (1798-1902) – 12 million names found in original parish and civil records dating from the 1700s through the early 20th century.

* Deutsche Telecom (1881-1981) – An estimated 70 million names contained in German phone books.


* Australian Free Settlers Collection (1826-1922) – 9 million names of free settlers and travelers to Australia.

* Como Italian Tribunals (1866-1936) – 10 million names in Civil Registration Records from the province of Como.


* Inbound UK Passenger Lists (1878-1960) – 20 million names of those passengers traveling to the UK.

Mr. Sullivan says that these are only part of their planned new content. Read the whole press release. This is great news - I can hardly wait for some of those databases.

I truly believe that we are in a "golden age" of online genealogy resources that has been made possible by competition - Ancestry, WorldVitalRecords, Footnote, GenealogyBank, FindMyPast and other commercial sites along with FamilySearch, WeRelate, MyHeritage and other free sites are racing to digitize and index as many genealogy records as possible. I'm rooting for all of them!

No comments: