Monday, January 28, 2013

The Interactive Viewer on Ancestry.com is Great!

I know that I looked at the Interactive Viewer used for some of Ancestry.com's record collections since it was released last year (see Ancestry.com's New Interactive Image Viewer, 23 February 2012), but I keep discovering new features on it.  There are two Ancestry.com blog posts that describe the Interactive Viewer:

*  Interactive Image Viewer - Coming Soon to More Collections (23 January 2013)

*  Interactive Image Viewer (Beta) (31 January 2012)

After reading those posts (again!), I went crawling around the 1940 U.S. Census and noted these features that I really like:

1)  I found the Lyle Carringer family (my mother's birth family) in the 1940 U.S. Census residing in San Diego, California:


As you can see, the person searched for is highlighted in yellow, and the family is highlighted in light green.

There is a zoom bar on the right side of the screen.  The user can use the + and - keyboard keys to zoom in and out also.  The user can use the left and right arrow keys to pan left and right.  There is a green "Index" button at the bottom of the screen.

2)  I zoomed the image up a bit so that the names were easily readable, and dragged/dropped the image so I could see the Carringer names:


Once the census page heading information disappeared from the image, a strip appeared at the top of the image that listed the column headings.  That is really helpful!  Also, putting the mouse over any field entry (line and column) results in a description of the entry in the column for the person on the line.  That is useful.

3)  I dragged/dropped to the right-hand side of the census page, and saw:


Once I moved to the right so that the Name field disappeared on the left, the indexed names appeared on the left-hand side with the yellow/green background colors.  That is very useful.

4)  If you can't figure out the field entries on the census page, you can see the indexed values by clicking on the green "Index" button at the bottom of the screen:


That also is very helpful.

5)  Now where did the Source information go?  I found the "View Source" link in the "More?" link at the top right of the page:


Clicking on the "View Source" link opened a small window in the middle of the screen:


The "Source" window has the information about the source citation (but only year, place, Roll number, page number, and Enumeration District number).  The user still has to add the address, family number, family identification, etc.  The window also provides a description of the Enumeration District, Source Information, and Source Description.

6)  There are more print options also.  Using the "Print" link on the top right of the screen:


The user has these options:

*  Print the entire image (in landscape mode)
*  Print the zoomed image (landscape mode)

*  Include index and source (in portrait mode)
*  Print the index on a separate page (in landscape mode, two pages)

Those options are also very useful.

8)  Now I'm wondering if there is a list of the record collections that use this Interactive Viewer.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/01/the-interactive-viewer-on-ancestrycom.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

1 comment:

Wendy said...

Hi Randy,

I couldn't agree more. The interactive viewer is very handy and I love the slider so I don't have to click to zoom in/out.

Wendy