Thursday, April 16, 2015

Ancestry Academy Launched Today

Ancestry.com has launched Ancestry Academy today - see the press notice at Introducing Ancestry Academy, a New Way to Learn About Family History.  The article notesL:

"We are excited to announce the launch of Ancestry Academy, a new educational website that offers exclusive, high-quality video courses taught by genealogy and family history experts. Ancestry Academy courses cover a wide range of relevant family history topics and offer something for genealogists of all levels."

Ancestry Academy is a genealogy education  website with self-paced multi-class courses on specific topics.  Courses are taught by expert instructors, including some employed by Ancestry.  At the end of each course, the student can take a test, and if s/he passes the test, receive a course completion certificate.  There will be free courses, and fee-based courses.

Ancestry Academy's director is Laura Prescott, a well-known professional genealogist.  She gave an overview at RootsTech 2015 of this offering.  In addition, some geneabloggers have had advance access to the beta site to see how it works.

Here is the opening screen (when I'm signed into my Ancestry.com account):


There are links at the top of the screen for "My Courses" and "Course Library" and a search field.

I clicked on the "Course Library" link and saw the list of available courses.  There are 15 at present:


The 15 courses available at the launch are:

*  "Finding Your Military Veterans on Fold3" with Krista Hegerhorst
*  "DNA 101: An Insider's Scoop on AncestryDNA Testing" with Anna Swayne
*  "Getting the Most Out of Family Tree Maker" with Duff Wilson
*  "Digging for Answers With Find A Grave" with Michael Lawless
*  "You Found What in the 1940 Census?" with Anne Gillespie Mitchell

*  "Your Family History Online: Laying the Foundation" with Anne Gillespie Mitchell
*  "Who is That Tick Mark? Using Early Census Records" with J. Mark Lowe
*  "Exploring Pension Application Files" with Debbie Mieszala
*  "Brother vs. Brother: Exploring Civil War Ancestors" with Amy Johnson Crow
*  "Finding Ethnic Origins and Passenger Arrival Records" with Juliana Szucs

*  "Public Libraries: Mining Untapped Genealogy Resources" with Patricia Moseley Van Skaik
*  "Street Smarts: Finding Your Ancestors in the Big City" with Juliana Szucs
*  "Cousin Bait: Make Social Media Work for You" with Anne Gillespie Mitchell
*  "The Buckeye State: Researching Your Ohio Ancestors" with Amy Johnson Crow
*  "Native American Ancestry?  Steps to Learn More" with Paula Stuart-Warren

There are several more courses coming soon:


The Ancestry Academy "Help" page has a short video tour describing the offerings:



I will write more about the Ancestry Academy after I've gone through a few courses.

This is another online genealogy education opportunity for beginning, intermediate and advanced researchers.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/04/ancestry-academy-launched-today.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver


2 comments:

Colleen G. Brown Pasquale said...

Wonderful!

Jo Henn said...

Thank you Randy! Your post explains this better than Ancestry's announcement did. For that reason, I've included your post in my NoteWorthy Reads for this week: http://jahcmft.blogspot.com/2015/04/noteworthy-reads-10.html.