It's time for this week's Ancestry Quick Tip Jamboree! Thanks to everyone who has sent in a Quick Tip. Please keep them coming so that we can keep this tradition going. You can send your tips to ADNeditor@ancestry.com

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 Daily News and Ancestry Weekly Digest, please state so clearly in your message.

Have a great day!
Juliana

Photo Age Determined by TV Guide
With the many recent Ancestry Quick Tips for organizing and dating photos, I would like to share my experience dating an 8MM home movie of the entire family at my grandparents' house on Christmas Eve circa 1950s. Family members had their guesses, but I wanted to be as accurate as possible.

I noticed a TV Guide magazine on the coffee table in a scene of the living room. I could barely make it out, except for the fact that the person on the cover was wearing stripes. I contacted TV Guide's office, before the days of the Internet, and gave the description of the subject on the cover and the time frame for the movie.

Within minutes, the TV Guide representative came up with Imogene Cocoa on the cover, December 18, 1954. Mystery solved.

Of course, now this can be done on-line in no time at all by browsing through the TV Guide Cover Gallery.

Christine Greco
Hawthorne, N.Y.

Census Spreadsheet Fields
I would like to add to the “Create a Census Spreadsheet” Quick Tip that was given by Beverly Lewis in the October 22, 2004, issue.

I also export my family in to an Excel spreadsheet, list the name of my ancestor in the first column, and have a column for the spouse's last name. This saves me time when searching for a female so that I don't have to keep going back and forth to find married and/or maiden names.

I also have a column for date of birth and date of death, that way I can put an n/a in the years that do not need to be searched for.

The last thing that I do a little differently is instead of putting an "x" in the year found, I put the state abbreviation in which I found them in. I do this for two reasons. The first is that when I need to search for other years, I know the most likely state to start my search in. The second is that if I ever need to go back to the census for any reason, I know which state to go to.

Courtney D. Bivona
Trumbull, Conn.

Photo Envelopes May Not Be Archival Safe
Although I think Susan Hopkins made many good points in her tip "Organizing Photographs in Six Steps," I think it's important to point out that the benefit of storing photos in archival boxes will be negated by leaving the photos and negatives in the envelopes the photos come in, which may not be archival safe.

Kris Blanchard
Ypsilanti, Mich.