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Ancestry is free until Monday.
We have used it and very limited use.
A couple names posed to us and this is all there is:
First and middle initial, last name, and place of residence in the 1920's.
Year of death.
First glance thousands of results. Most of what we see has the wrong first name based on the initial.
We know their occupation if any results are to be had searching that?
We do have a death year for one of them and it seems Ancestry wants birth year. We see no death date entry.
I'm not really sure what you're looking at, Howard. If you're looking at the 1920 census, there will be a lot more info than that, and no year of death. It sounds like you maybe are looking at another tree and that's all the info the tree owner has on that person. It's best to work from actual records, not other people's trees - but you've been posting here for years so you must know this?
As for searching by occupation, there are some records which index the occupation, so you can certainly try.
Ancestry does not require a birth year to do a search on an individual, but it does help narrow down the results greatly.
I'm not really sure what you're looking at, Howard. If you're looking at the 1920 census, there will be a lot more info than that, and no year of death. It sounds like you maybe are looking at another tree and that's all the info the tree owner has on that person. It's best to work from actual records, not other people's trees - but you've been posting here for years so you must know this?
As for searching by occupation, there are some records which index the occupation, so you can certainly try.
Ancestry does not require a birth year to do a search on an individual, but it does help narrow down the results greatly.
We signed in for the free search. The only page to get started asked for name and birth. We only have first initial and last name and place of residence during the 1920's. We tried to edit the search and add more but it was very limited. We'll post results of what we see after clicking on occupation search and this is what they ask for and what we have in pink.......
Not looking at any tree. General search to get anything. First initial, last name, year of death and any event in......... gets nothing helpful.
We signed in for the free search. The only page to get started asked for name and birth. We only have first initial and last name and place of residence during the 1920's. We tried to edit the search and add more but it was very limited. We'll post results of what we see after clicking on occupation search and this is what they ask for and what we have in pink.......
Not looking at any tree. General search to get anything. First initial, last name, year of death and any event in......... gets nothing helpful.
Well it looks like you found the advanced search so you should be okay now. If you go to a specific collection, the search page for it may have additional fields to search by too.
But yes, the general search to get anything can include member trees too so you have to be careful of what you're looking at.
I'm not sure if I'm right about this or not but my hunch about Ancestry.com is that they do not have anything else that you could not find elsewhere online.
I think they just have compiled all available data into one website which makes the search way easier.
You could do the same thing on your own if you don't mind reading. ALOT (which I don't).
I have had to do ALL my research without paid access to ANY site & was able to trace my husbands family, all generations, back to the late 1400's. Also my fathers family to the early 1600's & even managed to fill in some "blanks" that my uncle (published 40+ times) had left.
I may be wrong but once I got the hang of it I managed to Google my way through hundreds of ancestors. I used the public library for free access to Ancestry.com to cross-reference my results & had not been wrong once.
Just my hunch. Would have been quicker with paid access but I also ran across stuff that wasn't even on Ancestry.com's radar at all.
I'm not sure if I'm right about this or not but my hunch about Ancestry.com is that they do not have anything else that you could not find elsewhere online.
I think they just have compiled all available data into one website which makes the search way easier.
You could do the same thing on your own if you don't mind reading. ALOT (which I don't).
I have had to do ALL my research without paid access to ANY site & was able to trace my husbands family, all generations, back to the late 1400's. Also my fathers family to the early 1600's & even managed to fill in some "blanks" that my uncle (published 40+ times) had left.
I may be wrong but once I got the hang of it I managed to Google my way through hundreds of ancestors. I used the public library for free access to Ancestry.com to cross-reference my results & had not been wrong once.
Just my hunch. Would have been quicker with paid access but I also ran across stuff that wasn't even on Ancestry.com's radar at all.
From my own research, I found that Ancestry does have stuff that, at the very least, is difficult to locate elsewhere online (specialized military databases, certain wills and probate docs, etc. There seem to be a few international files on Ancestry that I cannot locate elsewhere, but I keep trying.). These things may ultimately be found elsewhere, but I haven't found them yet. I started out using the free Ancestry tree while using free sites like familysearch, census.gov, and others, but eventually my needs started to get more specialized and more difficult, so I decided to subscribe (basic membership) for at least a month (we'll see). There's only so much that can be done via Ancestry and online in general. Ancestry has many strengths and much data, but yeah, I've found a lot of stuff in other online archives.
From the left image above we tried the possible genders and race. We entered the first initial and last name, entered the year of death in the "any event" and in the "lived in" we entered the location and the exact year on that. The results were 0 until we changed the lived in to be "not exact."
We also, in the second image, tried "occupations." At one point and (we can not get there now) we had the city directories. We put in the exact state and city and got nothing but all other states other than the one we have.
The last name is common of course but the other data we enter is 100% accurate and Ancestry can not find anything.
As one point it wanted us to pay to continue though we were already logged in.
A more organized way would be city directories > choose the state from the entire list of states > choose the county in the state you are looking for > list of cities in those counties.
We do not plan to spend any more time on Ancestry. We have exact last name, exact year of death and exact year and location of an event and a first and middle initial. Ancestry struggles with those details.
If anyone has any better way to use Ancestry with the little info we have please post links or images before the promotion ends on the 6th. Thanks.
I'm not sure if I'm right about this or not but my hunch about Ancestry.com is that they do not have anything else that you could not find elsewhere online.
I think they just have compiled all available data into one website which makes the search way easier.
That's definitely not true. Some collections can be found elsewhere online, not all. Not by a long shot.
Quote:
Just my hunch. Would have been quicker with paid access but I also ran across stuff that wasn't even on Ancestry.com's radar at all.
Of course Ancestry.com does not have all records out there, far from it. All genealogists should make use of other resources too. And Ancestry.com is not necessary for research, because all records on there can be found offline too. Genealogy existed long before Ancestry.com. But there are plenty of collections Ancestry.com have that aren't available elsewhere on the internet. Just off the top of my head, the Philadelphia probate records are only available online at Ancestry.com. FamilySearch has a ton of Pennsylvania probate records, but not Philadelphia.
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