Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Tuesday's Tip - Collect Ancestry.com's FREE State Resource Guides

This week's Tuesday's Tip is to use the FREE State Research Guides on Ancestry.com to aid your genealogical research.


There are at least eight FREE state research guides on the Ancestry.com website - see the list here (I'm not sure that it's up to date).  Here is Ancestry.com's description of these state research guides:

"Learning about the history and what resources are available for the places your ancestor lived can give your research a solid boost. Our state research guide series includes historical background, a chronology, helpful information on census and vital record availability, highlighted collection for that place on Ancestry.com, and links to important resources beyond Ancestry.com.
"We'll be continuing to add states throughout 2014, so if we don't have your ancestor's state yet, stay tuned.
Alaska (02 January 2014)
California (08 January 2014)
Georgia (25 November 2013)
Indiana (12 December 2013)
New York (14 January 2014)
Texas (25 November 2013)
Virginia (9 December 2013)"

not included on the page above is the:


Here is a screen shot of the top of the 8-page New York State Research Guide:


There are sections for:

*  New York History
*  New York Censuses
*  New York Vital Records
*  Special Collections on Ancestry.com
*  New York Timelines (Through 1960)

These state research guides can be downloaded as a PDF file and saved to your computer files.  As a PDF file, I can put them in Evernote and am able to read them on my laptop, my smart phone and my tablet also.  

There are other free research guides available on Ancestry and other websites - the Ancestry.com Family History Wiki has a summary page for New York at  http://www.ancestry.com/wiki/index.php?title=New_York_Family_History_Research that links to New York specific research topics which contain links to online databases on Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.

Ancestry.com has a page for Free Research Guides in the Learning Center under the Next Steps tab - here is a screen shot of the top of the page:



There are many articles on that page for different localities and record types.  But not the list of free state research guides.

Interestingly, it is very difficult to find all of these guides without a link from some other source.  Ancestry.com should put a link to one page with all of their guides in their "Learning Center" tab on their menu bar on the top of their pages.  

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/01/tuesdays-tip-collect-ancestrycoms-free.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver


3 comments:

Geolover said...

Randy, this is very useful.

And Ancestry.com's link setup is not quite as fragmented as you suggest.

On the Free Research Guides page (your last image), the link at left to Free State Research Guides is to the list of State Guides with which you began this post.

Kristie Wells said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Kristie Wells said...

Hi Randy, thank you for the mention of our State Research Guides.

We plan to launch 50 guides in 50 weeks, so how (and where) they are displayed on our website will be changing a bit in the near future. I appreciate your feedback regarding our website navigation - we will absolutely take it into consideration.

Cheers,
Kristie Wells
Director, Global Social Media
Ancestry.com