Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Tuesday's Tip: When a Genealogy Website is Down, Find Something Useful To Do

This week's Tuesday's Tip is:  When a genealogy website is down, do something useful on another website.

Users of Ancestry.com, Find A Grave, and several other Ancestry.com owned websites were surprised on Monday, and again today, when the websites were not available.


Woe, woe, woe.  What to do?

On Facebook this morning, Kirstie Wells explained:

"Unfortunately, the issues we were experiencing yesterday continue today and our service is not currently available. Please note this does affect all Ancestry websites including Find A Grave, Archives.com, Rootsweb, etc. We do not have an ETA on when we will be back online, but will keep you posted as we have news to share.  

And if you are looking for projects to do while we are offline, here are some ideas: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152189672101630&set=a.190472761629.140062.7483836629&type=1

UPDATE (8:00am PST): Fold3.com and Newspapers.com are currently available, but do require a separate subscription. We continue to work on the rest of Ancestry's websites."

There are some good suggestions on the list of suggested projects.

I faced this problem most of yesterday afternoon and evening - what was I going to do without Ancestry.com and Find A Grave?  And again this morning.  How in the world could I possibly work on my genealogy research without them?

The answer, of course, is to do something else to advance the ball in your ancestral research game!

Here are some of the things I did:

*  Added some of the record images that I've collected over the past month or so to my RootsMagic database.

*  Searched for Laver and Vaux ancestral data in South Petherton, Somersetshire - I stumbled upon the South Petherton Church Records site (and wrote about it in South Petherton, Somerset, Genealogy Information - A Volunteer Effort).

*  Used the MyHeritage Record Matches for Newspaper Archives and California Birth Records to add content and sources to my database.

*  Added more content (events, sources, life sketches) to the FamilySearch Family Tree using the RootsMagic FamilySearch tools.

*  Checked out some of the recently added FamilySearch databases.

*  Read the genealogy book I got at Jamboree and tried out some of the suggestions.

*  Caught up on some of email, including sending the "Genealogy 101" syllabus material to the attendees at the CVGS Research Group as promised.

*  Worked on the presentation and handouts for my next OASIS class on "Beginning Computer Genealogy" that starts on 7 July.

*  Transcribed more of the 1858 Mortimer Seaver murder trial newspaper article for a future blog post (today?).

*  Watched a Jamboree video on the livestream channel and one of DearMYRTLE's YouTube videos with Cousin Russ.

There were more tasks to work on, but I went to bed relatively early last night.

So if Ancestry.com and Find A Grave don't come back today, or tomorrow, I'll do more of the same, and probably will do several different things.  This morning, I've already looked at new databases on Mocavo and searched for people on MyHeritage.

So - do you think that Ancestry.com will extend our subscriptions to make up for the days we lost waiting for them to recover from this attack?

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Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver



2 comments:

Unknown said...

I finally found out this morning about Ancestry.com when I was searching for a fix to my FTM2014 going at a CCCRRRRRAAAAAWWWWLLL since yesterday. Could the fact that FTM2014 cannot connect to Ancestry makes it unresponsive (every 4 or 5th character I type, or for every fact I try to enter, or every time I switch to another person)??? I just quit for the day and will go quilt instead!

JuneA** said...

You have been productive! Thanks for posting this (saw it on Pinterest!) I was beginning to think there was something wrong with my computer. You've inspired me to get to work again--instead of sitting here fuming at the keyboard.