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Pat Phalin learned she had hearing loss at 30, when she volunteered to give hearing tests at her local school.

DNA is one of the fastest-growing genealogy services of today. A patent battle has been brewing in the U.K. for a couple of years but now apparently has been settled.

This is my first post on the Ancestry.com Blog. I work in the Content group and I’m responsible for many of the relationships with State Archives and Vital Records groups.

This past week, I along with Quinton Atkinson and Brian Peterson, some of the Content group colleagues, attended a conference of the National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators (NAGARA), of which the Council of State Archivists (CoSA) is a subset. Most all of the states were represented there by their State Archivist and some of their staff. It was a great opportunity to get together with them and understand their needs and how Ancestry.com can work with them. We were specifically focused on how we can collaborate on digitization efforts.

Currently Ancestry.com has either signed or has pending agreements with close to 20 U.S. State Archives. The agreements cover various types of records including vital, military, naturalization, court and land records and address mutually beneficial priorities.

At the conference, Ancestry.com personnel participated in several sessions. We joined FamilySearch for a grant writing reality type presentation. Both parties offered grants to NAGARA members for digitization services. The applicant finalists made presentations and then a peer review committee (like American Idol judges) gave critiques of the grant proposals. Finally, two winners were announced and we explained why we selected their proposals. Ancestry.com will assist FamilySearch in the digitization of Summit County, OH Vital Records.

Ancestry.com also announced that we would be awarding $1.5 million in digitization services grants through State Archives in the first quarter of 2009. We handed out Grant Packets to nearly 70 interested parties and there was palpable excitement over the announcement.

Many of the sessions emphasized how Ancestry.com and FamilySearch are working on a cooperative basis on joint digitization projects. The conference was the platform for announcing the Enhanced U.S. Census Project: http://tgn.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=123

Another prominent topic at the conference was the “Preserving the American Historical Record” (PAHR) bill, which was sponsored by CoSA and introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on May 14, 2008, as H.R. 6056. You can follow the progress of this bill at http://www.archivists.org/pahr/. The State Archivists have tried for many years to get funding from the federal level to preserve and create access to historic records. This is the farthest they’ve ever gotten. Ancestry.com has been very supportive of this effort and participated in the PAHR presentation. The above link has a place where you can go to contact your representative to help get this important genealogical legislation past.

Our attendance at the NAGARA/CoSA conference emphasizes Ancestry.com’s strategy to work closely with state and local governments to digitize significant amounts of their content and to do so collaboratively. I would be glad to hear from any of the Blog’s readers about how you would like us to work with the archivist community.

Barack Obama is claiming a link to the Wild West - Wild Bill Hickok, to be precise.The Democratic presidential candidate came to this town on the edge of the old West on Wednesday and laid down a challenge for ...

It took almost 83 years, but Wesley Hillier found the paternal side of his family that has been a lifelong mystery.

I am helping my daughter find her fathers birth parents. He was born September 13, 1948.

For whatever reason, you may have had ancestors from Canada. After you calm yourself and catch your breath, you can then go on to trace your Canadian family genealogy .

Exactly 100 years ago, the Greene family, the founders of Newport, had their 100-year reunion and now, a century later, the family is having another such reunion.

In my previous post, I discussed some improvements and adjustments we were planning to make to the new home page based on your feedback.  Here is an update on those promised improvements:

Quicker access to the Search box
 
Based on the feedback we received since my last post, we changed how we were planning to give you quicker access to the search box.  Several members suggested that that they would like to choose where each section appears on their home page- including the ability to move the search box up.  We agree that is a great idea and today we launched an improvement that allows you to rearrange the sections of the home page

To rearrange your page, look for the green “Customize this page” button in the bottom-right of the homepage:

Once you click the button, you can move the sections up and down within their columns by using the arrow or by dragging them into position. When you are finished, click “Save changes”. 

Making it easier to add the links you really care about

We launched another improvement today that you may have already noticed- the new “Add to Quick Links” link located in the header of many Ancestry.com pages.  This handy tool makes it quick and easy to add a Quick Link to a page on the Ancestry site. 

To use this tool, navigate to one of your favorite pages, and click the “Add to Quick Links” link located in the header:

and

You will be asked to name the link (optional) and save it.  The link will be automatically added to the Quick Links section of your homepage.

Additional links to commonly used content

As promised, we recently added some additional links to the Quick Links section to the Ancestry Card Catalog and the US Military Collection.  These links were added for everyone, so if you do not want them in your Quick links, you can remove them by putting your mouse over the link and clicking the trash can icon.

New Search Interface

In my previous post, I let you know that we identified a bug that switched some users into the new Search experience when they clicked on one of the Quick Links on the home page. This bug was fixed a couple of weeks ago. 

If you find that you are still in the new Search experience, and you do not wish to be, click on the Search tab, and click the link near the upper-right of the page called “Switch back to the old search experience”.  We are sorry for any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused you.

We really appreciate your feedback and patience as we made these improvements and as we continue to improve the homepage.

Exactly 100 years ago, the Greene family, the founders of Newport, had their 100-year reunion and now, a century later, the family is having another such reunion.