Ancestry Magazine

The Family and Local History Collection @ Ancestry.com

Have you ever met someone who thought getting their entire family history was as easy as performing a search on the Internet? All they would have to do is enter in their family name and voila! It magically appears. Such a pot-of-gold scenario is not altogether likely, but it is made more possible through collections like the new Family & Local Histories collection at Ancestry.com.

This collection includes more than 20,000 previously published histories, dating from as early as the 1500s. The histories profile families and localities from all fifty states in the United States as well as the provinces of Canada and the countries and counties of the British Isles. Remember, the information in a compiled history has varying degrees of accuracy and source citation. You’ll want to document the information you find with your own original research.

As the title of the collection implies, there are two types of books in the Family & Local Histories collection—family histories and local histories. Family histories are written to compile the history of a family or surname, the genealogy of a family, or the descendants of an individual. Local histories detail the history of a town, business, community, etc.

The data in this collection has been reproduced from materials housed in libraries and manuscript collections. These materials typically focus on the history of a particular area and its people and are generally not available to most library patrons.

To make this wealth of information available online, Ancestry.com relies on technology called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to electronically scan printed pages and translate them into digital images. Once the pages of each book have been scanned and the images have been created, each word on the page becomes a searchable keyword in the database.

Getting Started
To begin searching the Family & Local Histories Collection, go to the “Search Records” tab at Ancestry.com and click on “Family & Local Histories.” Once you are there, simply type an ancestor’s name or specific keyword into the appropriate search fields. Clicking on “Search” will initiate a search of the 20,000 book titles in the collection.

Like the other collections at Ancestry.com, once the search has been completed, a results page will display a list of potentially relevant titles. A brief description of each book will help you more closely determine which of the titles could be a match to your query.

The following three examples will help to show how the different searches work ( you’ll want to try each search method) and the valuable family history details that await.

Example 1: An Exact Matches Search
A search for Edmond Durfee using the “Exact Matches Only” search yields six matches. Three books look the most promising among these matches. A closer look at the results in the book History of Newport County, Rhode Island show some inaccuracies in the search results. The search found the last name “Durfee” and the first name “Edmond” on the same page, but the names are not adjacent. Instead, we find a Thomas Durfee and an Edmond Estes. This shows an important characteristic of OCR technology: because both “Edmond” and “Durfee” were on the same page, they came up as a match.

Another book in the results list is Utah Pioneers and Prominent Men, and clicking on the link gets a more accurate result. The text on the page includes the following: “Edmond Durfee”killed in raid by mob.” Further text reads, “”Dolly Durfee, daughter of Edmond Durfee and Lainey Pickle of Nauvoo, Ill.” From a few lines of this book, we learn how Edmond died and the names of his wife and one of his daughters. This is only the beginning of the story. Clicking on “View Full Context” reveals the full context of Edmond’s death as it appears in the book.

Even more exciting is the information in the third most promising book, Utah, Our Pioneer Heritage, found in the same search. This book gives Edmond’s daughter’s personal account of the family’s experiences. Along with many other stories, she validates the information found in Utah Pioneers and Prominent Men and adds more detail to the stories.

Example 2: A Best Matches (Ranked) Search
When searching the Family & Local Histories collection, there are two options—Best Matches (Ranked) and Exact Matches Only. Both searches are valuable, but they search on different criteria, and your results will differ.

For example, a search for David Brinton using Best Matches (Ranked) returns more than 3,000 results. But above the long list of results is a list of links to “Narrow Your Search by Database.” You’ll want to be sure to scan this list for potential goldmines. In this case, The Brinton Genealogy is listed below the American Genealogical-Biographical Index (AGBI). Bingo!

The book lists the history of the Brintons starting from a William Brinton in England in 1635, who happens to be this David Brinton’s ancestor. This simple search resulted in more than 200 years of Brinton history and genealogy, complete with names, dates, places, and stories.

Example 3: A-Z Alphabetical Index Search
A keyword search isn’t always the most efficient way to search the vast collection of family and local histories. Suppose some of your ancestors immigrated from England and eventually settled in the small town of Paris, Greene County, Arkansas. A search in both the Exact Matches Only and Best Matches (Ranked) search boxes for a local history using the keyword “Arkansas” yields more than 3,000 results. Adding the keyword “Paris,” narrows the results down to 574. That’s still more than most researchers would like to search through.

A more efficient way to search the database is through the A-Z alphabet inde x, located beneath the search field in the Family & Local Histories collection. Each keyword in the titles in the collection are represented in this index. To find a book about Arkansas, click on “Ar,” then “Ark.” This will list all the books that have “Arkansas” in the title.

One of the books that appears is History of Greene County, Arkansas. Now, a search for “Paris” in the keyword box yields specific information from a page of the book that gives the town’s location and date of establishment as well as other details about the town and its prominent citizens.

Don’t underestimate the value of this collection. Naturally, there are ancestors you will not find references to in the Family & Local Histories collection. But when you do, you’ll find that the other popular collections at Ancestry.com (e.g., Immigration, U.S. Federal Census, United Kingdom, and U.S. Records) will become more useful resources for documenting the information you do find. This new collection may just be your genealogical pot of gold!

Neil Hibbert is an associate product manager for MyFamily.com overseeing the Family and Local Histories and U.S. Records Collections. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University in Family History/Genealogy.