FindFamilyCrest.com

Most Family Tree Maker users are familiar with the process of merging Ancestry.com facts and records into their tree. But did you know you can merge information from other websites too? It’s called Web clipping, and it’s one of my favorite tools. 

If you find information on a website (such as a marriage date, photograph, or town description) that you want to add to your tree, you don’t have to type it in manually. Family Tree Maker can do the work for you.

1. On the Web Search workspace, access the website you want to “clip” information from. 
2. On the Facts tab at the bottom of the window, click the Person from your tree button and select the individual you want to link the information to.

To copy information for a fact:

1. On the Search Result Detail toolbar, click the Enable web clipping button (the button on the far right).
2. Highlight the text on the website. The Insert Fact drop-down list appears.
3. Choose a fact from the drop-down list. 
4. When you have selected all the information you want from the website, click the Merge button on the Search Result Detail toolbar. The Web Merge Wizard will launch. 

To copy a photo: 

1. Click the Media tab at the bottom of the window. 
2. Move the cursor over the browser window until the image you want is highlighted by a green dotted line.
3. Click the highlighted image. A thumbnail of the image appears in the Search Result Detail section.
4. When you have selected all the photos you want from the website, click the Merge button on the Search Result Detail toolbar. The Web Merge Wizard will launch. 

1. Click the Notes tab at the bottom of the window. 
2. On the Search Result Detail toolbar, click the Enable web clipping button (the button on the far right).
3. Highlight the text on the website.
4. Click the Insert Note button that appears. 
5. When you have selected all the text you want from the website, click the Merge button on the Search Result Detail toolbar. The Web Merge Wizard will launch. 

Seeking Longs in Wiley's Cove, Searcy, AR mid 1800's: Elvin, Jane, parents to: Sanford, Malissa, Margaret, Sanfrancisco and George.

Last weekend I took my niece and nephew to the Living Planet Aquarium in Sandy, UT. Since it was my first visit, I was trying to view the exhibits in a systematic fashion to make sure we didn’t miss anything. In the special Amazon exhibit, I spent five minutes trying to get my little niece to look at a blue frog that didn’t interest her all (my nephew and I both thought it was the coolest thing we’d ever seen).

Eventually I decided to stop trying to control her experience and just let her explore the aquarium in her own haphazard, two-and-a-half-year-old way. I even bought her a pink stuffed Nemo that she picked out in the gift shop, although I’m pretty sure every clownfish I’ve seen in nature has been orange.

I hope that when you use MyCanvas to build a book or poster, you feel free to explore, experiment and express your own personality. Our product development team has tried to give you as much creative freedom as possible, so that you don’t feel like there’s a control-freak aunt standing over your shoulder telling you where to put your photos or what colors you can choose for a border, background or caption (or stuffed clownfish).

This month we’ve added several new features that give you more flexibility than ever. For the examples below, I created a page in our “Baby Girl Pink” photo book theme. These screen shots are a little grainy, but I think you’ll get the idea.

Although I’m using a photo book page to demonstrate the new features, they apply to family history books, posters and calendars as well. The only exception is the layout switching feature, which doesn’t work for family history book pages that require data from your Ancestry.com tree. But if you have photo layout pages or text layout pages in your family history book, you can use layout switching for those pages.

Our new layout switching feature lets you easily change the layout of an existing page. Go to the Layouts tab in the left panel to see the available options. In the top part of the Layouts tab, you’ll see the basic layouts that aren’t associated with a particular theme. In the bottom part, you can view the layouts for a particular theme. Use the drop-down menu to narrow down the options according to the number of photos you want to include on the page. For book pages, there are also a few text-only layouts.

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By hovering over page thumbnails in the Layouts tab, I can see how this page would look if I applied a different layout.

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When I find the layout I like best, I just left click on the thumbnail to apply the layout to my page.

What if I want to swap these two photos so that the one on the left is in the right image box and vice-versa? Instead of finding the photo thumbnails and reapplying them to the page, I can use our new photo swapping tool to make the switch. When you’re on a page with two or more photos and you select one of the photos, you’ll see an icon in the top right corner with an arrow and two little boxes.

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Click on that icon, hold down your left mouse key and then drag and drop the photo into the other image box.

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When you release the cursor, the two photos will have switched places.

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You can do the same thing with text, too. Click on any text box. Then click on the text swapping icon (which looks just like the photo swapping icon) in the top right corner of the text box.

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Hold down your left mouse key and drop the text box into another text box on the page.

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The caption from Text Box A will appear in Text Box B, but with all of the formatting attributes (font size, etc.) of the original caption in Text Box B.

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The last feature I want to show you is our new panning tool, which lets you drag a photo within an image box. You’ve always been able to pan in MyCanvas, but we’ve made it easier and more intuitive. Whenever you click on an image that’s pannable, you’ll see a compass-like icon in the middle of the image.

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What I mean by “pannable” is that the original photo has been cropped. Either part of the photo got cropped off when you dropped it into an image box or you manually cropped the photo after you placed it on the page. Panning lets you adjust which parts of the photo show up and which parts get cropped off. Place your cursor in the circle, hold down your left mouse key and drag the photo within the image box.

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Once you start panning, you’ll see the whole photo. The parts that are cropped out will be transparent. When you’re done panning, just release your mouse key.

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By the way, we recently added more than 2,000 new K&Co. scrapbook embellishments, as well as a new collection of masks with brushed edges. To check out our new features and content, go to http://ancestry.mycanvas.com.

Birth mother/father/siblings or other family. Me:Male,nee 4/23/1946@ unwed mothers home in New Orleans,La. Adopted app.

There is a long list of things we want to improve in search (and in new search in particular) – and we’ve started with what you’ve told us is the most important – getting relevant results; and relevance is our top priority this year in search.

And date relevance seems to be the most requested change. If you tell us grandpa died in 1910, you really don’t want to see a 1930 census record.

Making places more relevant and names more relevant are also important, but dates seem to be the one thing we’ve heard the most about. And not to worry, we will get to places and names as well.

So, sometime Wednesday around noon EDT (that’s about 4pm GMT, and about 9am PDT) , you will start to see some changes in your results for ranked search.
And when you’ve got billions of names and records this stuff takes a while to roll out, so I can’t pinpoint the exact time. But this is reasonably close.

Here are the changes we’ve made:

• If you are searching for someone and you just know a birth year, we will assume the person lived about 100 years. And we will only return records from the birth year - 5, and birthdates + 102.
• If you are searching for someone and you just know a death date, we will again assume the person lived about 100 years, and we will only return records from the death year - 105 to death year+2.
• If you put in both a birth year and a death year, we will return records between birth year - 2 to death year + 2.

Why did we choose a 5 year “fudge factor” for birth year and a 2 year “fudge factor” for death year? We’ve spent a lot of time with census records, and vital records, and when those dates are wrong, they usually fall into that range.

I’m going to try and guess at some of your questions. If you have other questions about the changes we made to make dates more relevant, please post them in the comments.

Questions

• So what if I use a range on the birth or death year? If you have a birth year of 1850, and choose a range of +-2, and a death year of 1904 +- 10, then we will look for records between (1850-2-5) and (1904+10+2) or 1843 and 1916.
• Why do we use a fudge factor? Because our ancestors were absolutely horrible with dates and getting them right. Our tests show that a “fudge factor” of five for birth year and two for death year gets better results.
• What if I don’t want the fudge factor added in? Then add five to the birth year, or subtract two from the death year and you’ve outsmarted the system. I wouldn’t recommend it; you may be outsmarting yourself.
• Should I mark dates exact? Depends. Death date is usually a very bad date to mark exact, because so few records have a death date. So enter the death date as limiting factor, but don’t mark it exact unless you are specifically looking for records that have that exact date in them. Birth year shows up in lots of records, so that is a better choice for exact, though that does require that a record have a birth year or an age. And remember, you can mark exact and a range, and that will match anything exactly in the range. I recommend this strongly for birth year.
• What if I see a record that looks like it should be date filtered out of my results set, i.e., I put in death date of 1903, and it’s from 1920? It probably means we haven’t reindexed that data set yet — we’ve covered about 95% of all eligible records for launch. Feel free to leave the name of the data set in a comment on this blog post and we’ll make sure it gets on
  the list. We are working our way through all of our data sets, but we started with some of the biggest and most commonly surfaced in our search results.

• What if I don’t want you to date filter for me? If you don’t use dates at all, we can’t and won’t lifespan filter. Or you can type in a broader range of dates to include more records. But this one is a no brainer, as many of you have pointed out — lifespan filtering is going to give you better results. Now when we launch place filtering (hmm….wonder if that is a hint of things to come soon…) we will make that something you choose or not choose, because you will need more control over that.

This is a new addition to our algorithm, so if you have questions, this is the place. I’ll be keeping an eye on this blog post.

This will benefit both old and new search, but we really think you’ll see the difference most in the new search interface. There are many more improvements to come, and in the meantime, I’d encourage you to take a fresh look at new search and see how much this has improved the results you see.

One other thing – we’ve also heard from a number of people that you like to use new search for some types of search, and old search for others – but that switching between them is a pain. To make this easier, we’ve just retired the “introduction page” and introduced a simple link in the yellow bar at the top of the page to enable you to switch easily between the two searches. This will be available tomorrow (Wednesday) as well.

Happy Searching!

Birthmother searching for her daughter who is now 18. Bethany Ann was born on Jan 3, 1991 in Oregon, adopted by a family whom I believe is from Florida in 2004.

As some of you have noticed, some of our data sets are not returning results when they are searched.

We are currently working on it and I will post updates as I get them.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

"A QUEST FOR FAMILY HISTORY" BAPTISM,MARRIAGE AND DEATH RECORDS NOT AVAILABLE ON LDS.MICRO-FILM . ALSO EXTRACTIONS FROM PLACES ALL OVER CHIHUAHUA.1600'S TO 1900'S.PASAJERO DOCUMENT OF LOPE DEL HIERRO,TESTAMENT OF DOMINGO GONCALES.

I am the great-grandson of Charles Oscar Pritchett, born 4/25/1884 to a J. Frank Pritchett in Hill, Tx.