New Stuff at Ancestry.com

How often do you check out what is new at Ancestry.com? I don't do it often enough!

Ancestry updates their "What's New" page every so often - it is at http://www.ancestry.com/home/new.aspx. The featured collection this week is Records of the Mayflower Descendants - with digitized images and indexes for many published books about Mayflower passengers and their descendants.

Ancestry added 7.3 million historical records this week - including:

* British Army WW 1 1914-1920 Pension Records,
* Irish Passenger Lists 1803-1806,
* Directory of Scottish Settlers in North America, 1625-1825
* German City Directories - 130 Volumes
* Family and Local Histories

Of course, this list will be obsolete soon.

I usually check on the recent Ancestry.com additions using this link - http://www.ancestry.com/search/rectype/recent.aspx. This lists the added or updated databases by date. For instance, reading this list shows that the following databases have been recently added (and may be featured next week on the "What's New" page):

* Index to Irish Wills, 1536-1837, 4 volumes.
* 1828 New South Wales (Australia) Census
* Families Directly Descended from all the Royal Families in Europe (495-1932) and Mayflower Families.

Of course, there are even more new databases. What they don't tell you is that some of them are in the non-US portions of Ancestry, so if you don't have a World subscription or a special subscription you can't access them.

Will any of these databases help your ancestral search? I'm going to go browse a bit through the Mayflower material and capture some of the useful pages for my ancestral families. The estates and deeds information looks useful to me.

Lastly, did you know that Cyndi Howells has set up a "Free Databases on Ancestry" web page? It is at http://www.cyndislist.com/ancestry.htm#Free. I hope she cleared that with Ancestry - remember what happened to the previous "What's Free?" site back in April?