Genea-Musings: Types and Number of Databases on Ancestry.com

Types and Number of Databases on Ancestry.com

I was curious to see how many of each type of database that are available on http://www.ancestry.com/, so I made this list:

As of today, 22 December 2009, Ancestry.com has 29,356 databases in their Card Catalog. The number of databases (not number of records) in each category include:

* 345 in Census and Voter Lists

* 1,003 in Birth, Marriage and Death

* 374 in Military

* 257 in Immigration and Emigration

* 9 in Family Trees

* 1,339 in Newspapers and Periodicals

* 1,431 in Member and Directory Lists

* 23,724 in Stories, Memories and Histories

* 380 in Court, Land, Wills and Financial

* 439 in Reference Materials and Finding Aids

* 22 in Pictures

* 33 in Maps, Atlases and Gazetteers

That sums to 29,356! So it appears each database is in only one specific category. I've always wondered about that!

I checked all of those categories using Old Search. New Search has a different number of databases in many of the categories - for instance, New Search has 439 databases in Census and voter Lists, while Old Search has 345. Why the difference?