I've been feeling particularly patriotic lately with Memorial Day and the Fourth of July just behind us. Couple that with the latest World War I draft card releases, and I'm very excited about researching my family's military history. (Even though my great-grandfather's draft card continues to elude me!) My family has a legacy of military service (a great-grandfather in World War I, another in both World Wars, a grandfather in the Korean War, and my father-in-law in Vietnam). I'm also going out on a limb and trying to find my great-great-great grandfather in any Civil War records; he was the right age in the right place to have served.

As I sat down to begin searching both online and off, I realized that I needed a little more direction. Military records are a rather new research area for me, and I didn't know very much about them. This is where Learning Centers, a new feature on Ancestry.com, became quite handy.

Introducing Learning Centers
Learning Centers are free areas on Ancestry.com where you can learn about various family history topics. Each of the ten learning centers focuses on a family history concept or an Ancestry.com record collection:

• Census records
• Birth, Marriage, and Death records
• Trees and Community
• Immigration records
• Military records
• Directories and Member Lists
• Family and Local Histories
• Newspapers and Periodicals
• Court, Land, and Probate records
• Reference and Finding Aids

These topic-focused areas allow you to easily find basic information for each topic, search tips for using Ancestry.com and for finding records in other places, success stories from researchers, pointers on where to look for more information, interesting facts about the topic, and answers to frequently asked questions. You can read articles detailing the use and value of a collection, view sample images, see records for famous people, and get ideas for next steps in exploring Ancestry.com.

For example, the Military Learning Center includes an overview of military records, a list of types of military records in the collection (with specific emphasis on World War I draft cards and Civil War Pension files), a short biography of General George Armstrong Custer (famous for his Last Stand) with links to his military and other records on Ancestry.com, and blank World War I draft card forms to aid my search for those great-grandfathers.

Locating the Learning Centers
Learning Centers are easy to find by clicking on the “Learning Center” tab from the Ancestry.com home page (www.ancestry.com/learn/). On the right-hand side of the main Learning Center page is the heading “Learn More About.” This list gives the names of and links to all the Learning Centers, clicking on one of these links will take you to the welcome page for each center.

From a specific Learning Center, you can access other centers by looking for the “More Learning Centers” text toward the top of the screen and selecting from the drop-down box to the right of the text, or through the search pages for main collections on Ancestry.com.

Learning Centers and Your Family History
Ancestry.com created these content areas so everyone could learn how to better search the website and how to research a specific topic in other locations. Learning Centers provide places where people can find out why they should search specific record types, who might be found in the records, and why the records are important sources of family history information. Rather than providing just a search box and a list of possible matches, as was usually the case on Ancestry.com previously, we wanted people to know the purpose of records and how those records relate to your personal history.

The main idea behind these learning centers is simplicity: The Library on Ancestry.com is filled with great articles on family history by our favorite Ancestry Daily News and Ancestry Magazine authors, but finding all the articles on a specific topic can sometimes take a while. The military learning center includes links to articles focusing on major wars and conflicts that involved the United States. By bringing together the best content for a specific subject, Learning Centers can help you get the most out of your research time on Ancestry.com.

Learning Centers provide information for family historians at all skill levels. Most of the centers cover basic family history topics, thus their content is fairly basic. Some centers, the Court, Land, & Probate and the Reference & Finding Aids centers, for example, cover advanced topics and thus include more advanced content than other centers. The more advanced centers include tools to make the information accessible to all skill levels, for example a glossary of legal terms is provided in the Court, Land, and Probate Center for those of us without Juris Doctorates.

The Future of Learning Centers
The current Learning Centers will be expanded as new content is added to Ancestry.com and new articles about the topics are written. Additional Learning Centers will be created as new databases and collections are added to Ancestry.com. Other centers will be centered on specific holidays and hobbies related to family history.

The Military Learning Center helped me get to know the types of records that exist for the various conflicts in which my ancestors were involved. I have a good idea which records to search for my third great-grandfather's Civil War service and even found articles from the Library that will help me find more information about the both World Wars and the Korean War.

Anastasia Sutherland Tyler is an associate editor for MyFamily.com, Inc. Her heritage includes German, English, French, Irish, and Scottish ancestry, a fact that may explain why decision-making is always such an internal conflict for her. She can be contacted at adntech@myfamilyinc.com, but regrets that she is unable to assist with personal research.