Popular genealogy website Ancestry.com has announced the official launch of its new website for subscribers in the United States. The website was in beta for several months in the country as the company received feedback from early testers of the site and made changes to enhance user experience.
Ancestry.com is a place where amateur historians and people interested in tracing their genealogy roots can collect, organize, and even digitize their information. Many users digitize and upload old family photographs or birth and marriage certificates, for instance, preserving them for all time and creating a virtual “safe” of family information for generations to come.
But Ancestry.com wanted to create a richer user experience with the new site, and relied on feedback from its members who are actively engaged on the site and serious about their own family genealogy. Because of the website’s access to historical records in various cities, as well as public records detailing historical events around the world, Ancestry.com provides a lot of background information for users to create a more enhanced story of their ancestors and where they came from.
For instance, Ancestry.com allows members through its streamlined “Life Story” feature to create detailed stories about their family heritage by adding historical information to photographs. They can also highlight major events like birthdays, marriages, and migration to new cities, and upload important documents and family records. These events can then be tied these in with local and national historical records of the time to create a comprehensive story about the time and place of family members’ lives.
“Fact View” is an additional feature which give members a more comprehensive view of a persons life outside of names, places, and dates. The “Media Gallery” feature helps members organize photos, records, and documents easily. It gives the user a more engaging experience while using the site.
According to the company website, the foundation of Ancestry.com is “an extensive and unique collection of billions of historical records that we have digitized, indexed and put online since 1996. We have developed efficient and proprietary systems for digitizing handwritten historical documents, and have established relationships with national, state and local government archives, historical societies, religious institutions and private collectors of historical content around the world. These digital records and documents, combined with our proprietary online search technologies and tools, enable our subscribers to research their family history, build their family trees and make meaningful discoveries about the lives of their ancestors.”
For more information on the online genealogy service you can read our Ancestry review.
