FindFamilyCrest.com

Thanks to all of you who offered comments and suggestions in response to my last post. I’d like answer the two most common questions and then tell you about some recent improvements.

“I’ve created a book in the 8.5×11 inch format, but now I want the larger size. Can I upgrade to the 11×14 inch format?”

Our two current book formats have the same aspect ratio, so it seems like it should be easy to convert from one size to another. Unfortunately, scaling up presents some technical problems that we haven’t solved yet. The area of the 11×14 inch page is about 50% bigger. Depending on the resolution of your images, some images that look fine on the 8.5×11 inch page might look grainy if you enlarged them by 50%.

The other issue is the text. If you automatically changed all the text from, say, a 10-point font to a 14-point font, some of the lines would wrap differently, and you’d have to go through each page and make a lot of adjustments — especially to the family trees and family group sheets.

At a minimum, we’d like to allow you to convert the final print-ready file of your 8.5×11 inch book into an 11×14 inch print-ready file. This means you could print your book in the larger size but you wouldn’t be able to edit the larger version. I don’t know when this feature will be available, but I’ll let you know as soon as I have more information.

“Now that you’ve raised the page limit, I want to combine two books into one longer book. Is there an easy way to do this?”

Yes! You can’t actually merge two books (yet), but you can copy pages from one book into another book. And you don’t have to do it one page at a time, either. Read on…

Better page management

Earlier this week, we launched a new page management feature. You can now copy multiple pages within the same book or from one book to another. Reordering pages, which used to be a tedious process, is much easier, and so is deleting pages.

To access this new feature, just click the “Manage Pages” icon at the top of AncestryPress. You’ll see a screen that looks like this:

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To select multiple pages, just hold down the “Control” key. You can reorder the selected pages by dragging them to a new spot, or you can print, copy or delete them by clicking the appropriate button on the left side of the screen.

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To copy pages to another project, select the pages and then click “Copy to a Project.” A little box will pop up with a list of all your projects. Select the project you want and then click “Continue.”

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More desktop printing options

Many customers have told use they’d like to print more than one page at a time on their home printer. Several people have asked for a “Print All” button that lets you print the whole book. The problem with this idea is that most people have lots of images in their book, and sending all those files to print at once would cause a system meltdown for most computers and/or printers.

Our product engineers have settled on a compromise: to let you print your book in five-page batches. Based on customer feedback, we may adjust that limit up or down. The optimal batch size really depends on how much power and memory you have, so if printing five pages is making your computer crash, try printing two or three pages.

When you print pages at home, you can now choose between two print methods: raster and vector. I’m not an engineer, so please don’t ask me what those words mean, but I can tell you how they affect you.

When you print using the raster method (“Normal quality”), your images are converted into a series of pixels. This is important because pixels do a good job of capturing subtle effects like drop shadow, variations in opacity, etc.

When you print using the vector method (“Higher quality”), your images are converted into a series of mathematically generated outlines. For some mysterious (to me) reason, this method produces sharper text and images. But for some equally mysterious reason having to do with Flash technology, subtle design effects like drop shadow don’t come out very well. Because of this limitation, our engineers have programmed AncestryPress to turn off the embellishments altogether if you print using the vector method.

The best print method for you depends on the type of content you have in your book and what you are trying to accomplish.

If you are printing proof pages:

• Choose “Normal quality” if you just want to check the overall design before ordering a professionally printed book.
• Choose “Higher quality” if you want to carefully check the text and images before ordering a professionally printed book.

If you are printing pages that you want to keep in a scrapbook:

• Choose “Normal quality” if you have a lot of embellishments and other design elements.
• Choose “Higher quality” if you have a lot of text and few design elements.

Please note that when you order a professionally printed copy of your book, the design elements, text and images will all come out sharp and clear (unless your images were scanned at a low resolution to begin with). Our printer uses a different, offline printing process, so there’s no tradeoff between the design elements and the text and images.

Our goal is to provide you with output options that work for you. Most AncestryPress users are also Ancestry.com subscribers, and you’ve made a significant investment in your family history research. Of course we’d love to have you order a professionally printed book from us, but if you prefer to print at home, we want you to be happy with the results.

By the way, several customers have told us that having us print their book is actually cheaper than buying high-quality paper and ink cartridges, so make sure you’re factoring in all of those costs when deciding how to print your book. If you choose to print your book at home, you might want to skip the embellishments and drop shadows when you’re making your book so that you can pick the high-quality print option.

Finally, on a separate topic, this weekend would be the perfect time to put together a quick gift for Dad using our Father’s Day photo book template. I may be biased because I work here, but I think the guy who designed the template did a terrific job. The order deadlines for delivery before Father’s Day are June 2 for standard shipping and June 4 for expedited shipping.

It's hard to imagine, but hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people die each year whose identities are known , but for whom no family member can be found to claim their body.

Yesterday we made some improvements to public member profiles on the site. Some of you may not know that there were member profiles on the site, so let me tell you a little about them.

Your profile is a place that you can let others on Ancestry know about you. It’s designed to showcase your family history interests and experience so that you can connect with others who may be doing similar research as you, or who may even be related to you.

The information you add about yourself, especially the research interests you enter, also helps you connect with other members you might not have discovered otherwise. First, others on the site can search for you and other similar members through our Member Directory. Second, when you tell us more about yourself we can automatically suggest other members you might be interested in contacting. You’ll find some of these suggested connections when you visit the main Community page on the site.

With these changes we have updated the design of the profiles so that they hopefully showcase interesting information better.  We’ve also tried to make it quicker and easier to edit your profile.  Finally, we’ve added a few new features:

• You can choose to show your real name instead of your username

• You can let others know about what kind of family history activities you can help with

• You can show off photos you’ve added to deceased ancestors in your public family trees

• You can include links to your public family trees (the living individuals obviously won’t be visible to others)

• You can show links to your favorite message boards or boards that you are the administrator for

In addition to the changes to the profiles themselves, in some areas of the site you’ll see members listed differently.  We’re now starting to show a thumbnail photo next to members’ usernames (or their real name if they’ve chosen to display it).  When you click the username you will get a preview of their profile without leaving the page.  If it’s interesting to you, you can click to view the full profile or to contact the member.  This is what it looks like:

You’ll initially only find this on the Message Boards, Member Directory, and Member Connections sections of the sites, but we hope to eventually add it everywhere.

To see an example of the updated profile, check out my profile.

We also suggest that you update your own profile.  You can also customize your preferences for how others can connect with you and what sections display on your profile.

We really hope that you take advantage of these updates to public member profiles and find the opportunity to connect with other family historians.  If you have any feedback after trying out the profiles, please feel free to leave a comment here or email me directly (dgraham at tgn.com).

I’m pleased to announce that Ancestry’s new search preview is now available to all Ancestry users!  Based on thousands of pieces of customer feedback, we’ve completed some new search features that we believe will make searching for records about your ancestors easier, faster and more effective.  You can now switch to the new search and give it a spin by clicking the “Try It” link at the top of the main search page…

or you can just click here: http://search.ancestry.com/search/preview.aspx

Don’t worry, if you want to switch back to the old search (although I can’t possibly imagine why you would!? J ), all you have to do is click on “Switch back to old search experience” and you’ll be back to the old interface again.

Here are some of the features that I think make the new search a great improvement over the old search:

• Type-ahead tools
  • As you type information into a search field, we forecast what you’re typing and make it easy to automatically fill out the search form based on the information in your family tree.  If you don’t have a family tree on Ancestry yet, you should add one just to try this out.  It’s really a time-saver.  We also added type-ahead functionality to the location fields on the form so that you can search for any place out there, not just one in the limited dropdown fields in the old search experience.

• Image snapshots
  • Now you can see a preview of newspaper and book pages highlighting your search terms so you can tell if a match is relevant or not without having to click through to it.  This should be another big time-saver when you’re looking at books and newspaper matches.

• Site-wide search
  • We’ve made it easy to search all of Ancestry at once without sacrificing a thing.  You can also narrow down to improved categories and sub-categories of information.  For example, you can narrow down to Births, Marriages, and Deaths, to see a lot of vital records, but now you can narrow down again to just the Births or just the Deaths, so you don’t have to wade through all of them at the same time.

• Powerful card catalog
  • It’s easy to sift through the more than 25,000 titles on Ancestry with our new-and-improved card catalog.  Now you can sort the information in the catalog, and narrow by location, time period, category or language of the content.  It’s really handy, so give it a try.  You can also search for a keyword in the title or description of a title as well.

• Advanced searching
  • You can click on “Advanced” in the top-right of the search form, and turn on Exact match filters for each field in your search.  This allows you to mark a specific field as “Exact” while leaving the others fuzzy—it’s very powerful because we’ve added this functionality to each database.

• Summary view of search results
  • Now you can easily switch between sorting the results by their relevance or listing them out in a summary view that lets you see which databases got the most matches.  It’s nice to be able to switch between the two views so easily, and it gives you the best of both worlds.

• Adjustable text size
  • You can quickly adjust the size of the text so that it is easier to read.

We’re still working on even more improvements to search, so it should just keep getting better and better.  Go ahead, give it a test drive!

We’re excited today to be rolling a long-awaited and much-requested feature for family trees.

Many of our historical records on Ancestry have information in them about other members of the family—not just the one person. Previously when you saved a record, you could only save it to one person at a time, and if the record had information about other family members, you would have to find each of their individual records and save them one at a time.

Starting today when you find a record with family information, you can save and merge that record to multiple members of the household.

Is there a way to go back to hints you have previously accepted and re-merge those? Yes—last week we added a section to the list of hints for a person which now shows hints that have previously been accepted.

Merging responsibly

Now before you go off merging family information all willy nilly, please merge responsibly. The default selection on this new merge feature does NOT include the extra family members. This is so you can review them individually and be certain that they are a right match before you add them to your tree. As smart as our system is, it can still make mistakes and can occasionally recommend a merge of two wrongly matched people, or perhaps a merge that results in duplicate names in your family tree.

Give us your Feedback

So, how do you like this feature? Does it work well for you? What recommendations do you have? Please let us know how you like it. You can post a comment here, or if you prefer, feel free to send me an email directly (kfreestone at tgn.com).

I wanted to make everyone aware of our next Family Tree Maker Webinar. It is open to the public and is scheduled for June 5th at 8:00 p.m. EDT (2 a.m. June 6th Greenwich Mean Time).

The following items are scheduled to be presented:
• Find and Replace
• Filtering Features
• Working with media
• Sources and Source Citations
• Searching anywhere on the Web

There will be a 20-minute Q&A session afterward.

To attend the webinar, you must first register here.

Duff Wilson will be presenting and yours truly will be moderating. We hope everyone will be able to attend and look forward to having a great presentation and discussion.

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