10 February 2015

Search Coming to iOS Ancestry App

I've been using the Ancestry app more recently. It's not without its frustrations, freezing panes and mixing two different hint results. The good news is that later this month an update focused on searching their collections is coming.

"You’ll soon find two new options in the timeline view for your ancestors.  In addition to all the great hints we’ve already been bringing to you with the “View Hints” button, we’ll now be introducing the “Search Records” button where we’ll immediately take you to the most relevant records for your ancestor.  Also, within the timeline view, you will find our new Guided Search feature where we compare the details of your ancestor’s life and our record collection.  We’ll look for gaps we can fill with records that add new important information and add a blue bubble on to your timeline where we think we’ve got a strong match for a birth, death, marriage, or residence event.
Once you decide to search, from either starting point, you’ll immediately be given our best search results based on the details known about your ancestor. The interface in this view is tuned for mobile devices, providing a slider to narrow or broaden the search results according to commonly used search filters.  This allows you to focus on the records that most accurately match your ancestor, or broaden your criteria and find more matches with similar names and similar dates, looking for that hidden gem."
They explain that initially only the four most common categories of records; birth, marriage, death and census will be included with military and immigration added in the coming months.
Read all about the update at http://goo.gl/KokMv7

Hopefully the same functionality will be added for the Android app as well.

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