For those of you who don’t read my personal genealogy blog – Destination: Austin Family – you may not have heard that I will be visiting Ancestry’s headquarters in Provo, Utah later this week for Blogger’s Day.
Not only will I be given a “behind-the-scenes” tour of the Ancestry data center (which as a techie I am super-psyched about!), but I’ll be in dialog with several people from Ancestry during my visit.
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I’d like to propose a neat exercise similar to one I used when I worked in the corporate world. It is called “If I Were King Of ________,” where ________ is the name of the company we all worked for. It was an interesting way to give a voice to staff and many times upper management was surprised: their perceptions of what staff thought was important was not in-line with the actuality of what was important to staff.
Using the same concept, let me ask you, the readers of GeneaBloggers, this question: if you could ask Ancestry.com just one question, what would it be?
Don’t be shy and leave your one question – no more than one, no explanatory comments, just a question – in the comments below.
I can’t guarantee that I’ll even have the chance to discuss your question during my visit, but this is a way to gauge what matters to genealogists, especially those who work with blogs and social media.
© 2010, copyright Thomas MacEntee
Comments 20
If u could ask Ancestry.com just one question, what would it be? http://su.pr/24Gzlo #genealogy
Posted 04 Jan 2010 at 22:46 ¶RT @geneabloggers: If u could ask Ancestry.com just one question, what would it be? http://su.pr/24Gzlo #genealogy
Posted 04 Jan 2010 at 22:49 ¶How do you determine whether a given record group is likely to be popular enough to make it worth your effort and expense in filming and indexing it?
Posted 04 Jan 2010 at 22:51 ¶RT @geneabloggers: If u could ask Ancestry.com just one question, what would it be? http://su.pr/24Gzlo #genealogy
Posted 04 Jan 2010 at 22:55 ¶RT @geneabloggers: If u could ask Ancestry.com just one question, what would it be? http://su.pr/24Gzlo #genealogy
Posted 04 Jan 2010 at 23:00 ¶Why don’t transcribers use more logic or get second opinions when deciphering and then publishing a person’s name and surname?
Posted 04 Jan 2010 at 23:15 ¶RT @GouldGenealogy: RT @geneabloggers: If u could ask Ancestry.com just one question, what would it be? http://su.pr/24Gzlo #genealogy
Posted 04 Jan 2010 at 23:17 ¶Why doesn’t Ancestry.com stress proper source citations to it’s members? If they provided a source wizard like Roots Magic 4 does, then it wouldn’t be too overwhelming or difficult for users. Then….possibly more of their trees would be a bit more accurate and not full of falsehoods.
Posted 04 Jan 2010 at 23:20 ¶RT @geneabloggers: If u could ask Ancestry.com just one question, what would it be? http://su.pr/24Gzlo #genealogy
Posted 04 Jan 2010 at 23:23 ¶Does ancestry.com plan to open up their World Archives Project to Mac users?
Posted 04 Jan 2010 at 23:55 ¶Thomas – I am interested in these questions as well. Thanks for asking.
Russ
Posted 05 Jan 2010 at 00:18 ¶Are they going to have more parish records for the UK
Posted 05 Jan 2010 at 04:12 ¶I have a request for Ancestry rather than a question. Please, please, please make a greater effort to inform users that just because a “shaking leaf” appears, or a there’s a possible connection proposed to another family tree, it isn’t necessarily correct! First of all the connection has to be somewhat plausible. Dates and locations have to be possible. I am truly amazed and often just disgusted by some of the information in the public Family Trees and the connections made.
Posted 05 Jan 2010 at 07:06 ¶Why are private trees allowed to take from public trees but can refuse to share with others? I believe ours mothers all taught us if we want to play in the sandbox we should be willing to share. I fully understand if you want your tree to be private, but by doing so a private member should give up the right to access the public trees.
Posted 05 Jan 2010 at 07:30 ¶Could ancestry make the shoebox more like a filing cabinet so thatwe could file in a way that was helpful to the researcher (i.e., family surnames or individual names) with the records so we could easily find the information and/or have the system work so that if we check a record does not relate we could put a note in our shoebox that it has been checked? A good example of how this can work is with the Swedish company Genlines – you can put the documents you find and want to make a note of in a file and make any notations so that when you go back to look at it you can recall why you saved it and who it relates to.
Posted 05 Jan 2010 at 14:57 ¶Will “OneWorldTree” ever permanently disappear? (I’m begging!) This is one of the least helpful and most erroneous “creations” on Ancestry.com.
Posted 05 Jan 2010 at 15:12 ¶When doing a search, why don’t we have more parameters to narrow down the search – at the very least gender, or type of event such as birth, marriage, death?
Posted 05 Jan 2010 at 17:28 ¶Evelyn
When will you fix the mixed up ED’s in the 1910 census for Philadelphia? Images for ED 294 are inserted into the indexed names for ED 328 and vice versa. I blogged about it last July and notified them months earlier! See http://pastprologue.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/a-census-quirk-on-ancestry-com/
Posted 05 Jan 2010 at 18:30 ¶I particularly like Tessa’s question, but also have one of my own. Will we ever be able to merge new data from a GEDCOM file into an existing Personal/Private tree? I personally have mine set to private, and every time I update my tree, I have to remove the old one (to get rid of duplicate trees) and re-invite people to view my tree…it’s kind of a pain. Additionally, I’ve noticed that people do not remove the older versions of their tree, thus creating several duplicate records from the same person. Oh, and I have many other ideas…how can I get a job there
Posted 06 Jan 2010 at 02:35 ¶what would it take to get the floppy discs that i use for backup to where i can use them without getting an error message that they are invalid, which won’t let me use them
Posted 11 Jan 2010 at 13:00 ¶