| Ancestry.com’s Card Catalog: Cutting Through the Noise |
| Ancestry.com has a reported 30 billion records in its database, which is great news for genealogists. The not-so-great news: All those records make it seemingly impossible to find the one you’re looking for. A sitewide search for my ancestor Henry Witte using his birth year and exact surname, for example, turns up a whopping 22,000 results. Fortunately, Ancestry.com has a tool that helps you cut through all that noise. Like the namesake paper-and-drawer system used by libraries of yore, Ancestry.com’s Card Catalog sorts its collections into more-manageable categories, acting as a guide to only the collections you need. From the Card Catalog, you can see a full listing of Ancestry.com’s 33,000 collections and drill down to the specific collections useful to your research. Filter by record type, location or time period, or search using keywords. Click a collection title to visit its information page. From there, you can: - Search within that specific collection, making it easier to find records
- Browse the collection’s records by place, time, surname, volume, etc.
- Learn more about the collection: where it came from, what jurisdictions it includes, and more.
You do not need to subscribe to Ancestry.com to view the catalog. That means it has another useful application: helping you decide whether an Ancestry.com subscription is worth your money. Fellow subscription site MyHeritage has its own Collection Catalog, and Findmypast has a similar record set list. (So does FamilySearch, though that site is totally free to use.) You’ll still need to do a bit of digging to find your ancestors. But the Card Catalog can take those 22,000 record hits to “just” a few thousand or hundred. (No one ever said genealogy would be easy!) |
