Let's think about it for a minute. The collections at Ancestry.com have been growing for ten years. Ten years! Think back. If you had a computer ten years ago, what kind was it and what could it do? It was the day of the Zip drive (which wowed us at the time with its ability to store 100MB!), and Windows 95 was still new.

What kinds of databases were available then? Mainly indexes with few searchable fields. Compare that technology to the more flexible searching of more recent databases and their links to actual images. At the time, most of us probably didn't imagine it was possible to make the entire U.S. Federal Census (as well as much of the UK and parts of Canada) available for searching and viewing from the comfort of home.

Not only does Ancestry have to constantly update so that all the databases--old and new--"play nice" in the larger search environment of today, but they also have to have foresight and think ahead to emerging technologies and new data collections. This is a daunting task, to say the least, when you're working with upwards of 23,000 databases.

Where's My Keyword Search
With changes comes adaptation. My husband has had to adapt to some of the changes I made and is faced with where to stash his beloved sunflower seeds and where to plug in all his equipment. (The seed problem was quickly solved, whereas we're probably going to have to enlist the aid of an electrician to help us with the latter problem.)

We're also going to have to adapt to the search changes, and truth be told, it really isn't all that painful. Perhaps one of the most difficult changes on the search functionality was the loss of the keyword search and some other advanced functions on the main search pages. In speaking with some of the folks at Ancestry, I am told that the new advanced search page that is in the works will restore the missing search tools and add some new functionality as well.

But in fact, these tools are not really gone. The main searches will typically bring in more hits than you need, but once you locate a database of interest and are viewing the hits in a particular database, you have the ability to refine your search, typically in an advanced search template customized for searching the data within. These templates have always been more powerful and effective than the global search and for this reason it is the route I usually take anyway, bypassing the global search for the most part, and zeroing in on one database of interest.

How Do I Know What's Available?
There are several ways to explore what databases are available for your area of interest and the new Card Catalog is a great place to start. I wrote about it a while back on the blog and George Morgan also discussed it in his 18 June column.

The ability to browse by location is also still available. From the main search page just select the location you are interested in from the list or map in the lower left portion of the page and browse through the lists of titles, which are arranged by record type.

Explore a Bit
One good thing that comes out of change, is that it forces us to shed old habits and take a fresh look around. I played around with all the searches and although I found that I still like my direct approach best, the main search brought some new things to my attention. I searched "Photographs and Maps" for Brooklyn and found some great photographs that are available from the Library of Congress Photo Collection. One showed a family in 1912 making brushes at home. Since an ancestor of mine was a brushmaker, I found this particularly interesting. The photo citation reads:

8 P.M. Farrell family, 151 Eleventh St., Brooklyn. (See schedule.) They had temporarily discontinued the brush making, but sent to a neighbor for materials and posed for me, just as they had been doing it. The little five year old on the right is very deft. Her eyes seemed to be troubling her. Boy on left is a neighbor who makes them too. The father complained of the little money there is in the work. Location: New York--Brooklyn, New York (State)

Another photograph from 1908 showed a group of newsboys, one of them with a cigarette in his mouth. It was particularly heart-wrenching for me as he looked to be about my daughter's age.

The "Historical Records" search is a bit wider than it used to be when it comes to specifying a geographic location because, if for example you specify New York, it will pull up all of the hits for that name that even mention that location. For example, a search for James Kelly in New York turned up a James Kelly in Ohio Military Men, 1917-18, whose residence was Akron, Ohio. However, it also listed his birthplace as New York, N.Y.

Although you will see more hits than normal, it can also bring some hits to the surface that may have been overlooked because the location of the record wasn't what you expected.

With the launch of the new advanced search soon, the global search will be more powerful than before, and in the meantime, we may find that by shaking up things a bit, some unexpected gems may surface.

About the Author
Juliana Smith has been the editor of Ancestry.com newsletters for more than eight years and is author of The Ancestry Family Historian's Address Book. She has written for Ancestry Magazine and wrote the "Computers and Technology" chapter in The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy, rev. 3rd edition. Juliana can be reached by e-mail at Juliana@Ancestry.com, but she regrets that her schedule does not allow her to assist with personal research.

by Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak

When it comes to genetic genealogy (which I often refer to as genetealogy), Y-DNA is by far the most popular type of testing--and understandably so. Since Y-DNA is passed from father to son down through the generations (just like surnames) its application is fairly obvious. But over time, mitochondrial DNA (usually shortened to mtDNA) testing has been gaining in popularity.

How mtDNA Travels
Many folks regard mtDNA as the equivalent of a maternal version of Y-DNA testing and while there are some parallels, there are also some differences, and that creates a lot of confusion.

For instance, mtDNA is passed down through maternal lines, but mothers pass it on to both their sons and their daughters. The sons, however, become mtDNA dead ends and do not pass it on. This means that a brother and sister (who share the same mother) can both get tested for mtDNA, and that they both can serve as living representatives of their mother, their mother's mother, their mother's mother's mother, and so on. (Think of the bottom line of a pedigree chart). But when this brother and sister pass on, her children will continue to sport the same mtDNA, while his will have his wife's mtDNA.

Primarily a Deep Ancestry Tool
Perhaps the most important aspect of mtDNA to grasp is that it's essentially a deep ancestry test, and is not as genealogically useful as Y-DNA. If you're familiar with Bryan Sykes's best-seller, The Seven Daughters of Eve, you may recall that the underlying premise is that 95 percent of people of European origin can trace their maternal roots to one of seven women who lived in Europe approximately 10,000-45,000 years ago.

I, for example, am from haplogroup H (haplogroups might be thought of as branches of the world's family tree--in this case, the world's maternal family tree), which Sykes dubbed Helena. Her descendants were the most successful in reproducing. Consequently, roughly 30-40% of those of European origin are also H. And this, in turns, means that I have millions of maternal cousins. That's not tremendously helpful to know when it comes to tackling my family tree.

Are You My Cousin?
Unfortunately, a lot of genetealogy newbies fail to understand this, so once they get their results, they tend to play the matchmaking game. By this, I mean that they e-mail everyone who matches their mtDNA, share the usual name/place/date details of their direct maternal line back to their earliest-known ancestor, and then cross their fingers hoping for someone to report back having found some overlap. But because it's such a massive fishing expedition, this hardly ever happens. (I know of one success story, and in my mind, this person hit the mtDNA lotto!)

Given its limited utility, why would folks even be interested in taking mtDNA tests? One reason is simple curiosity. A lot of people are genuinely interested in knowing about their deep ancestry. So if you want to know roughly when and how your direct maternal line migrated out of Africa, you might take this test to find out. For most folks, this is all they will learn, but for many, it's sufficient.

Three Exceptions and...
Having just said that mtDNA tests are not very helpful for genealogical purposes, I'd like to point out a few important exceptions:

• First, you might be lucky enough to have rare mtDNA (taking the tree analogy a little further, you could think of this as coming from a branch or even a twig with very few leaves on it). This was true of Ann Turner, who co-authored Trace Your Roots with DNA: Using Genetic Tests to Explore Your Family Tree with me. Some people like Ann have very few, if any, mtDNA matches. Even though she is also in haplogroup H, the most common European one, she has a couple of additional mutations that reduce the number of exact matches all the way down to one. In cases like this, it makes sense to play the matchmaking game and compare notes.
• Second, you might be dealing with degraded remains, as is often the case with history mysteries. For instance, I recently worked on a BBC show to try to identify the two skeletons found in the turret of the USS Monitor a few years ago. In cases like this, scientists would love to use Y-DNA, but it's too fragile and doesn't survive. MtDNA, by contrast, is plentiful, so it is more resilient. It's not as precise, but it's usually all scientists have to work with. So in this case, I took the maternal lines of the sailors who lost their lives in the USS Monitor, and traced them forward in time to find living maternal relatives to serve as a basis for comparison to the DNA extracted from the remains. This is also what I routinely do on my cases for the U.S. Army's repatriation project (to help identify remains of servicemen still unaccounted for from WWII, Korea, and Southeast Asia).
• Third, you may have a specific, maternally-oriented genealogical conundrum--and if you're strategic about it, you just might be able to come up with a clever way to resolve it using mtDNA testing. There are a few examples on pages 69-73 of "Trace Your Roots with DNA." (Those who are registered at Amazon can use the "search inside this book" feature to view these pages or you can click here for a detailed version of one of the examples given).

...A Couple of Caveats
To this list of exceptions, I now need to add a pair of qualifiers. The good news is that testing companies and avid genetealogists are working together in an attempt to refine haplogroups. For instance, when I first got my mtDNA tested several years ago, I learned that I was H. Now I can find out that I'm H1*. Returning to the tree analogy, it's somewhat akin to learning which twig off of the H branch my maternal line comes from.

Also, mtDNA is finite. It has 16,569 base pairs, which sounds like a lot, but is nothing compared to the billions of bases found in nuclear DNA that's used for Y-DNA tests. So it's in the realm of the possible to test for your entire mtDNA sequence, which translates into very precise results.

The catch? Well, there are two. Once you have your sequence, you can theoretically play the matchmaking game again, but at prices currently in the $795-895 range, you probably won't have too many to compare against until prices come down. And I need to point out that a full-sequence mtDNA test is the first genealogical one that could conceivably give away medical secrets. Some conditions are passed through maternal lines (e.g., some kinds of muscle disorders), so your results could potentially reveal more than you'd care to know. Of course, you'd have to take your results (which are well-protected) and do some fairly intensive research or consult a genetic counselor, but in the interest of full disclosure, I feel obligated to mention this possibility.

Hop in the mtDNA Pool!
If you're new to genetic genealogy, I know this is a lot to absorb, so I'd suggest that you start with more conventional Y-DNA testing, perhaps joining a surname project. But if you're ready to take the next step or are just plain curious, I hope this primer will help you understand just what you can and can't learn from mtDNA testing.

About the Author
Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, co-author (with Ann Turner) of Trace Your Roots with DNA: Using Genetic Tests to Explore Your Family Tree (as well as In Search of Our Ancestors, Honoring Our Ancestors and They Came to America), can be contacted through her websites Genetealogy.com, Honoring Our Ancestors, and Megan's RootsWorld.

Upcoming Appearances by Megan

• 02 September 2006, Boston, Massachusetts
  Joint Genealogical Speakers Guild and International Society of Family History Writers and Editors luncheon at the FGS conference
• 21 October 2006, Ramapo, N.J.
  David Ackerman Descendants 1662
• 11-18 November 2006, Mexican Riviera
  2006 Genealogy Conference and Cruise, hosted by Wholly Genes Software

> Print or comment on this article

The following items were posted to the 24/7 Family History Circle blog over the past week:

• Recent Changes at Ancestry.com
• Polish Genealogical Society of America 28th Annual Conference
• National Archives-Great Lakes Region's "First Saturday" Research Hours Extended Through April 2007

from George G. Morgan

For each of your ancestors' vital dates (birth, marriage and death), always record the precise location as it existed at the time of the event. That means listing the town, the county or parish, and the state for U.S. events. For foreign locations, the town, province, and county should be recorded. More important, because boundaries and jurisdictions change so much over time, make certain you have the correct county or state, or province, or country listed as it existed when the event occurred. This is important to you for purposes of locating copies of records and important for future researchers who want to confirm your research and obtain copies for themselves.

> Print or comment on this article

Ancestral Greeting Cards
I have begun copying old photos and mounting them on cardstock to create greeting cards for my grown kids and other relatives. They can add them to their family history notebooks, if they wish. Especially good are crazy snapshots of their parents taken when they were young. You can buy envelopes at office supply stores in many sizes.

Pat Blake LaRock

Donate Research to a Silent Auction
I support a number of charities and non-profit agencies. Many of these agencies have auctions (silent or live) as part of their fundraising events.

I often offer ten hours of genealogy research and advice as an auction item. I am not a professional or certified researcher, but it's a good way for the agency to gain (usually) between $500 and $1000 for their work, it's not a strain on me, and the winner gets to deduct most of the cost as a charitable deduction.

If the winner is new to genealogy, I can easily spend that time getting them started and organized. If they are experienced, I can help them work on specific research, or help by being a "different pair of eyes" on their problems.

I enjoy learning about different kinds of records, or records about different locations, since the winners' ancestors usually came from different places than my own. And even some of the "losing" bidders are motivated to start our addictive hobby!

Jeff Lewy

Twenty Questions
I have been doing genealogy research since January of 2006. It's not a long time compared to many, but long enough to have a list of at least twenty questions I wish I could ask my ancestors about their children, way of life, certain good/bad events in their lives, funny stories about their parents/grandparents, etc. Since I can't ask them, I decided to think about my descendants instead. I made up a list of twenty questions I wish I could ask my ancestors and sent it to my siblings, parents, cousins, and aunts and uncles for them to answer and send back to me.

These Q&A papers will go into our family history I have been collecting, so that my future descendants will have answers to questions I never had myself.

Kim
South Carolina

If you have a suggestion you would like to share with other researchers, send it to: Juliana@Ancestry.com. Thanks to all of this week's contributors!

Quick Tips may be reprinted, with credit to the submitter, in other Ancestry publications, so if you do not want your tip included in a publication other than the Ancestry Weekly Journal please state so clearly in your message.

> Print or comment on this article

The year was 1873 and much of the world was entering into a long period of economic depression. The beginning of the Long Depression is typically marked by the crash of the Vienna stock market, which sent ripples across Europe and eventually the United States with the fall of Jay Cooke & Company. The Cooke investment bank was heavily invested in the overbuilt railroad system which was beginning to fail. With the fall of this prominent company, a financial panic ensued and the New York Stock Exchange had to close for ten days. Railroads, factories, banks, and businesses had to close their doors resulting in skyrocketing unemployment rates. The Long Depression would last into the 1890s.

There were other smaller scale disasters in 1873. The British SS Atlantic out of Liverpool (with a stop at Queenstown) hit a submerged rock en route to New York and was wrecked in heavy seas off Nova Scotia. It is estimated that 545 of the 952 passengers perished.

In Baltimore, Maryland, a fire began in the factory of Joseph Thomas and Sons and spread over ten acres of the city. Photos of the fire and aftermath can be found online at the Maryland Historical Society.

A cholera epidemic swept through Birmingham, Alabama. Below is an interesting excerpt from a report from Mortimer H. Jordan, who was secretary of the Jefferson County Medical Society of Birmingham, Alabama, at the time of the epidemic (found on the website of the Reynolds Historical Library at the University of Alabama at Birmingham).

The treatment adopted was the opium and mercurial. When the stomach seemed so inactive that nothing made any impression upon it, an emetic of mustard, salt, ginger, and pepper, suspended in hot water, in many cases produced a warm glow over the surface of the body in a few moments. . . . Diuretics produced no good results. No condition in life, sex, or age escaped. The sucking babe and those of extreme age suffered alike from its ravages.

Before closing this paper, justice demands that we should briefly allude to the heroic and self sacrificing conduct, during this epidemic, of that unfortunate class who are known as 'women of the town.' These poor creatures, though outcasts from society, anathematized by the church, despised by women and maltreated by men, when the pestilence swept over the city, came forth from their homes to nurse the sick and close the eyes of the dead. It was passing strange that they would receive no pay, expected no thanks; they only went where their presence was needed, and never remained longer than they could do good. While we abhor the degradation of these unfortunates, their magnanimous behavior during these fearful days has drawn forth our sympathy and gratitude.

Further north and west, Jesse James and the James- Younger gang robbed a Rock Island train near Adair, Iowa. This first train robbery netted the gang more than $2,300, but was most likely a disappointment for the gang. They were expecting a $100,000 gold shipment, but that shipment had been switched to another train at the last moment.

North of the border in Canada, the Dominion Parliament had more lawful goals in mind when it established the North-West Mounted Police, the predecessor of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Canada was growing and in 1873 Prince Edward Island joined the federation as Canada's smallest province.

In music, the song Home on the Range was born (Daniel Kelly & Brewster M. Higley). The tune went on to become the state song of Kansas and is known around the world.

> Print or comment on this article

If you'd like to see your ancestor's photograph in the Ancestry Weekly Journal, send it to juliana@ancestry.com.

Contributed by Pam Hammerstein Pam's great aunt Edith Parker and her daughter Lily. They immigrated to America possibly New Jersey. Pam is hoping someone might recognise it. A photograph of Edith's mother, Roseanna, stepfather, William Hatherley Clarke, and one of their children possibly William as a baby can be seen on the 24/7 Family History Circle Blog.	Contributed by Sandi Britton-Suggs Taken in 1907 in Pulaski County, Kentucky of Sandi's grandparents. William Grover Johnson and Eva Ellen Neely. William was born 02 Feb 1886 in Pulaski County, Kentucky and died at Clarendon, Texas on 09 Feb 1969. Eva was born 24 Dec 1889 in Pulaski County, Kentucky and died 11 Feb 1979 in Clarendon, Texas.

> Print or comment on these photos

Ancestry Magazine (One Year Subscription)

Finally there's a magazine that brings the relevancy and fun of this exploding national pastime into focus. Each riveting bi-monthly issue offers fascinating historical perspectives on the times in which your ancestors lived along with hard-hitting news, how-to's, and other genealogical gems to assist you in your own ancestral quest.

Normally, a one-year subscription costs for $24.95, but today you can buy it in the Ancestry.com Store for only $19.95.