Monday, July 23, 2007

Cool Ancestry Popup Tool

I was trolling through the 1930 census records tonight looking for the very elusive Robert Leroy Thompson family (see earlier posts here, here and here) and was surprised to see a pretty neat tool that http://www.ancestry.com/ has added.

When you get the list of matches to your search query, you can put your cursor over the "View Record" link (but don't press the mouse button!). A box pops up that lists the person's name, birth year, location, relationship to head of household, father's name, mother's name, and all the family members with their ages. This popup box works for all of the census records from 1930 back to 1850, with the appropriate list items.

This tool provides a peek at the family group that was enumerated - you don't have to click the link to see the family group. This is a wonderful tool that will save quite a bit of time when doing searches that result in many matches.

Unfortunately, I didn't find the elusive Thompson people even with the super Ancestry popup tool.

When did http://www.ancestry.com/ add this tool? I haven't done census searches for several days with Lolo in town, and haven't seen a reference to it anywhere.

UPDATE 7/23, 9 AM: All (or most) of the Ancestry databases that link to record images seem to have this popup tool. I tested it on Vital Records, Military Records, Immigration Records and other collections.

2 comments:

cheekygnome said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
cheekygnome said...

Considering how many years it took them to finally get around to providing support for Firefox beyond even the most basic capabilities I'm absolutely shocked to see them utilizing Ajax (used for the popups among other things).