I noticed that
Ancestry.com has started matching records in Ancestry.com for Death, Burial, Cemetery, and Obituary collections with persons in my family tree.
On the
Ancestry.com Death Records Education page,
www.ancestry.com/death, there is a box at the bottom right that shows how many persons there are with Death, Burial, Cemetery and Obituary collections in my Ancestry Member Tree:
As you can see, the box says that there are 2738 Hints in the Seaver-Leland Family Tree from the Death, Burial, Cemetery and Obituary collections.
I was excited about this - I would love to have the Hints on Ancestry for persons in my tree categorized by record type and record collection. That would be very helpful - it would short-circuit the search process significantly.
Here's what I saw when I clicked the link for "View all hints from this tree:"
There are about 887 pages of these, for Records only, not Photos, Story or Member Tree hints.
I expected that this would be a list of the Hints in only the Death, Burial, Cemetery and Obituary collections, but it isn't. It's a list of All of the 25,749 Hints for the 7,372 persons in this tree, including the birth, burial, cemetery and obituary matches, but it also includes birth, marriage, census and other record collections too.
There is another link on the
www.ancestry.com/death page - for "Search for them now," which goes to the
Death, Burial, Cemetery and Obituaries search page:
However, and it's a BIG However, there is no list of the matches of persons in my tree with the records in the Death, Burial, Cemetery and Obituaries records. In order to use this search page, I would have to go through every person in my database and enter their name, birth year, etc. in order to find the death, burial, cemetery or obituary record for them.
This was disappointing - I thought that I would be able to search from one selected database (e.g., Massachusetts Death Records, Find-A-Grave, Social Security Death Index, Newspapers Obituaries), or at least from within this category. I thought that there would be a button that says "See your Hints here" for this set of record collections.
In my "Ideal Ancestry World," the list of death collections on the right (in the screen above) would have the number of matches in each collection for persons in my database. In my ideal Ancestry World, I would be able to Review and Accept the Hint, or Reject or Ignore the Hint. That was my expectation when I started looking at this feature today.
It is evident that they have the ability to do it for ALL collections (they found over 25,000 for me in this tree). It is evident that they have the ability to do it for a set of collections (they found over 2,500 for me in the Death, etc. collections). The next step should be to identify matches in each collection for persons in my tree.
I hope that Ancestry adds this "Ideal Ancestry World" feature to their search features in the near future.
The URL for this post is:
http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/10/ancestry-matches-death-burial-cemetery.html
Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver
