21 April 2015

Explore by Location added at Ancestry

Ancestry's card catalog has been the way to find record sets for places up until now. That's remains available but now there's a new map interface for those of us visually oriented.
I found it via a tweet which pointed to http://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/ from where you scroll down to the map at Explore by Location.
The default zoom level shows Canadian provinces, US states and elsewhere countries. Zoom in and you'll find no finer definition of records in Canada, county or town level resolution in the US and county level in the UK and Ireland.
At any zoom level mouse over the icon and a bubble pops up giving the number of record sets. Click and a panel to the right lists the record sets and the number of records. It's a way to find some of the more obscure items such as books.
It's new and there are issues. In England Lincolnshire is missing and the icon for Cambridgeshire is not over the county. It may not be an error but the censuses for Lower Canada 1825 and Canada East 1842 are listed as sets applicable to Newfoundland and Labrador.

1 comment:

Peggy said...

Thank you for this tip, it's a great feature!