Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Ancestry.com Adds Page Control for Swedish Church Records

The Ancestry.com Swedish Church Records image and page number controlsOne of the things that makes browsing images difficult on Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org is that the image numbers don’t match the page numbers. This has been especially problematic for Ancestry.com’s Swedish Church Records collection, since some pages have hand-written cross-references to other pages.

Ancestry.com has addressed this problem by adding an additional control. One can now jump to any image number or any page number in that collection.

This is a great feature, especially for collections like this one that don’t include a name index. It’s one that I’d like to see implemented for all such “browse-only” collections at both Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org.

Ancestry.com Save to Person in Your Tree featureIn other news, Ancestry.com has made it easier to attach a record to someone in your tree after browsing to the record among the images in a collection. Click the Save button, and then Save to Person in Your Tree. A popup appears wherein you select the name from the names indexed on that page, select the tree (if you have more than one), and specify the person. Previously, you had to open the Index pane, find and select the name and then click the Save button.

Another recent addition is a fix to the new Search Sliders interface. When first released, it didn’t show all the stuff you specified for the search. As I recall, it didn’t show anything that wasn’t a name, date, or place. Things like gender, race, and relationship to head were not shown. I’m thinking they also didn’t show all the people and all the places. One had to click Edit Search to show the complete search form to see all that had been entered.

Now there is a link underneath the sliders which expands the area there and displays the additional values.

2 comments:

  1. One of the disadvantages to using the Swedish Parish records in Ancestry.com is exactly as you stated. The beauty of the Household Examinations (like census records) is they detail precisely the page you can find your family on in the next book or if they move in the parish it details the page and date of movement. Often the source record books for birth, marriage, death & moving in/out will also detail the exact page of location the family can be found in the appropriate Household Examination book. Hurrah...it is perhaps an easier follow to have the page numbers listed. Do hope FamilySearch will do a similar feature....as the ol' brain sometimes freezes keeping up with adding & subtracting numbers to get the correct page.

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  2. If there is a list of names on each page, why is there not an every-name index?

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