Thanks for trying the New Ancestry Search
Ancestry helps you find your ancestors quickly and easily because it brings up the best possible matches first in your list of search results, as indicated by the number of stars a match receives. The stars show how likely we believe a particular match is to be about your ancestor. Remember, the matches gradually get worse the further down the list you go.
To get the most out of your search, type in as much information as possible. The more search criteria the search engine has to match against, the more likely it is to pull the best matches to the top of your results list. Not sure about some information? Take an educated guess. As long as you're close, it can help.
Try these general suggestions to improve your results:
After completing your initial search, you might want to narrow your search results to those found only in a particular category or database. Simply click on the desired category or database listed to the left of the search results to narrow your results. This will take you to a new search results page that shows you results found only in the chosen category.
As you narrow your search to a particular category or database, some of your search options on the left may not apply because you’ve narrowed down to content that does not contain that type of information. For example, if you narrow down to the Census & Voter Lists category, you will not be able to add death information, as Census & Voter List records do not have death information.
This will allow you to search exclusively within that database thereby narrowing the scope of your search. Just keep in mind that the search field options may vary depending on the category or database selected.
You can also add or change information in your search at any time by using the Refine Your Search section on the left, adding more information, and then clicking the “Search” button.
Type in the full name of your ancestor, if you know it. The more information you give search engine to match against, the better results you will get. As you can imagine, it’s a lot easier to find an ancestor named John Smith if you can tell us that his middle name was Ebenezer because there are way fewer John Ebenezer Smiths in the world than there are John Smiths.
Ancestry automatically looks for common nicknames, abbreviations and other alternate spellings for you. For example, a search for "Bill Smith" might return "William Smith", "Wm Smith", "Bill Smyth" or "B. Smith". An exact name match is the closest match, and therefore the most relevant, followed by common misspellings, nicknames, and other variations. It’s important to remember that often times names are misspelled or mis-transcribed on the original records or in our indexes, so looking for alternate spellings can sometimes help you find a good match, even though the name may look wrong.
You can add a woman’s maiden name and we’ll look for both her married and maiden names. You can also do two different searches, one with her married name, and one with her maiden name.
Example 1: Mary Elizabeth Williams Smith
Example 2: Mary Elizabeth Williams
Example 3: Mary Elizabeth Smith
Adding birth and/or death dates can really help your search. It’s much easier to find Elizabeth Smith born in 1872 than it is to just find Elizabeth Smith. It’s even easier to find Elizabeth Smith born in 1872 and died in 1937.
Not sure about an exact date? Take an educated guess. As long as you’re within a few years, you’ll get much better results than if you leave a date field blank. We automatically look for close dates, just in case the record is wrong or your guess was a little off.
Be as specific as you can—if you know the city, start with it; if you don’t know the city, start with the county; if all else fails, try the state or country. Beyond birth or death location, be sure to add one or more residence places if you your ancestor spent a significant amount of time in a place other than the location where he/she was born or died.
To make it easier and faster to add place information, we present a list of places you can pick from as you begin typing a location—pick a place from the list to get better results.
If you'd like to search with greater control and accuracy, you can turn on the Advanced Search Options near the top of the search form. Enabling this feature will cause “Exact” checkboxes to appear next to each search field. If you check the checkbox next to a particular field, the search engine will only return matches that include and match that field exactly.
For example, if you were to search for Harold Jones born in California in 1922, and you checked the “Exact” box next to California and 1922, you would only get back results that contained birth details with birth place of California and birth date of 1922. By leaving the name “fuzzy” (not checking the ‘Exact’ box), you will get common variations of the name Harold Jones, like Harry Jones, as long as they match California and 1922 exactly.
When using the “Exact” checkboxes available in the Advanced Search Options, you may want to start with a broad search (enter as much information as you can), then check the “Exact” box next to only one or two fields. If you get too many results, check more boxes to narrow your search. If you get too few results, uncheck one or more boxes to broaden your search. Continue this process until you gradually hone in on the record for which you are searching.
It’s important to remember that names are often misspelled or mis-transcribed, so doing “fuzzy” searching on names can often help you find a good match, even though the name may look wrong. In the name and keyword fields, you can do extremely fuzzy searches by using wildcards. Wildcards are special symbols (the asterisk "*" and the question mark "?") that are used in searching to represent some number of unknown letters in a word. Wildcards can be effective search tools if you are searching for words or names with alternate spellings:
An asterisk "*" represents zero to six characters (e.g., a search for "john*" might return "john, johnson, johnsen, johnathon, johns", etc.).
Ancestry also supports exact phrase searching in keyword fields. You can use quotation marks to indicate that you want keywords to return as an exact phrase. For example, a search for the keywords Flying Tigers would return matches with the word Flying on part of the page and Tigers on part of the page. If you use quotation marks, however, (like “Flying Tigers”), you will only get back matches where the words Flying Tigers are very close to each other.
Browsing - Ancestry provides faster access to a wider variety of genealogical data than any other genealogy site on the Internet. In fact, Ancestry has thousands of databases of genealogical and historical information that you can search through. You can browse through Ancestry's databases from the main search page. To get to the main search page, click on Search in the navigation bar at the top of the page.
The bottom half of the main search page, under the heading “Browse Specific Titles” shows you a list of titles (also referred to as databases) that are available on Ancestry. You can use the filter options on the left-hand side of the list to narrow down to the type of database you're most interested. At the top of the list of databases, you will also see options to sort the list (by things like popularity or database title) or search the list by keyword.
Once you find a database of interest, you can click on it to be taken to the search page for the database, which includes a description of the database and a search form that searches only for records from that particular database.