19 October 2010

Ancestry Does Labs

Everybody's doing it.  Now Ancestry.com is climbing on the bandwagon with a Labs feature, applications in prototype or beta, not ready for prime time, and some that possibly never will be. 

Here's the information posted about the first item in Labs:
The first prototype that we’re launching today is codenamed “Person View” and we’re testing two new ideas:
1.     Person consolidation – can we group records and trees together in a way that exposes the relationships between records in a completely new way?
2.     Web records – can we find records on the web that match your query (from outside of Ancestry.com’s collections), and then link you directly to them?
You can access Person View from the labs website through this URL: http://www.ancestry.com/labs and you can see a quick demo of how Person View works here: http://screencast.com/t/Y2NiYWM2Y. Please give it a try and let us know what you think.
I tried it for a UK case and got a result that possibily open a new avenue of investigation for one of my problem lines.

Randy Seaver also tried it and seems to like the result. Read his comments here.

1 comment:

Ellen Thorne Morris said...

It is always a pleasure to locate people looking for the same ancestor. But it is sad to see how many people put down the strangest information as sources - giving birthplaces in the Americas before the colonies were settled, having a parent that only lived seven years. But maybe with all of us working on a single person, we can provide sources for all new cousins.