Traditionally, family historians have focused on building trees filled with names and dates, branching out to important life events such as immigration, marriage, and military service. But family history can be so much more than names and dates. As we search for our ancestors, many of us will have a desire to understand their lives and times as well. That's why Ancestry.com has begun posting what we refer to as “Rich Content.”
Rich Content is anything that adds context and flavor to your ancestors' lives (e.g., images, letters, music, newspaper articles, etc). In a January 2005 Ancestry Daily News article, Beau Sharbrough wrote about the music our ancestor's listened to; this is rich content. The Rich Content on Ancestry.com includes newspapers, maps, photographs, and post cards. These images can be printed to your personal printer, saved to your hard drive, or saved in your “My Ancestry” file (www.ancestry.com/myancestry/) for quick future reference.
Even if you can't find images of your ancestors in these collections, what you will find are images and information that add context to their lives. This article describes some of the newest additions to this ever-growing compilation and how you can use them to enrich your family history.
As an example, my great-grandmother Emily was born in 1899 and died in 2003. In addition to what I'll share about her below, here are some things I know about her that add interest to my family history, her father was the first on the block to own a car, and she and her daughter were in Pearl Harbor when it was attacked. She also lived to hold her great-great-grandchild in her arms. One of my pet projects is collecting memorabilia, guided by her memoirs, that will bring alive the places and events that impacted Emily's life.
U.S. Panoramic Photos, 1851-1991
(Available through a subscription to the Family & Local Histories Collection)
In this database, you'll find over 3,500 panoramic photos from through out the United States, taken between 1851 and 1991. Images include cityscapes, landscapes, portraits, and even the Cal vs. Stanford football game in 1925. (Cardinal fans will be happy to know that they beat the Golden Bears 26 to 14.)
Maybe you'll find a panorama of the city your ancestors grew up in, the beach they visited often, or the train yard where they worked. Six-year-old Emily was living in San Francisco with her parents when the earthquake hit on 18 April 1906. Perusing the panoramic photographs, I found numerous images of the city on fire and the city in ruins. These images gave me a new understanding of what she and other city residents lived through.
U.S. Historical Postcards, 1901-60
(Available through a subscription to the U.S. Records Collection)
The postcard database contains 2,888 postcards that were sent to various individuals throughout the United States between 1901 and 1960. About a third of the postcards include the name and state of the addressee and year of postmark. Where possible both the picture and the writing on the reverse side have been included on the website.
I searched this collection for images of San Francisco and was rewarded with many images of Emily's “old stomping grounds,” as she called them. I was able to print out images of the Bay Area, Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz Island, and many more from the time period that she lived in the city by the bay. Because I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I also enjoyed seeing how the places I know have changed over time.
U.S. Civil War Photos, 1860-1870
(Available through a subscription to the U.S. Records Collection)
Subscribers with Civil War soldiers in their family trees will find exceptional images among these approximately 6,900 photographs from the American Civil War. Try searching for the name of battles in which your ancestors participated or for the locations where your ancestors would have been during the war. You can even search for generals and commanding officers that may have influenced your ancestors' war experiences. For example, you can view photographs of the battlefields of Bull Run and Gettysburg.
New York Port, Ship Images, 1851-91
(Available through a subscription to the U.S. Immigration Collection)
Those of us with immigrant ancestors may be in for a treat in the New York ships' images database. This is a collection of images, both photographs and artistic renderings, of ships that arrived in the Port of New York between 1851 and 1891.
Unlike the other rich content indexes that contain only relatively few names, the ships' images are linked to about 3 million names of passengers in passenger lists. Therefore, you can search for you ancestors in the passenger lists to find their passenger records and then in the ships' photos to find images of the ships they arrived on. (The arrival date, port of departure, and ship name are used to link passengers to the ship photos.)
You can also find out information about a ship's build date, shipping line, tonnage, mast/funnels, and route. This number of images in this database will be expanding in the near future. Included among these images is the North Star, the steamer owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt, who is credited with building the famous Vanderbilt fortune.
Professional Baseball Players, 1876-2004
(Available through a subscription to the U.S. Records Collection)
Here you'll find information for over 15,000 professional baseball players who played between 1876 (the year the National League was founded) and 2004. Find out players' first and last names at birth, nicknames, birth and death information, college attended, height, weight, date of first game, date of final game, and date and round drafted. For many of the players between 1887 and 1938 you can view either their team photograph or baseball card. Baseball buffs may be interested in images of famous favorites included in this database are listed below:
Add to Your Collection
While Rich Content cannot replace vital and other records, it can add depth to your family tree. Photographs, paintings, music, and newspaper articles can illustrate family stories and bring family history alive for current and future generations despite their being further and further removed from the eras in which our ancestors lived.
Anastasia Tyler is the technical editor for the Ancestry Daily News and Ancestry Weekly Digest and the editor of the Ancestry Monthly Update, MyFamily Weekly Update, and Genealogy.com Member Update. She is also a contributing editor for Ancestry Magazine. She can be contacted at adntech@myfamilyinc.com , but regrets that she is unable to assist with personal research or questions about subscriptions to Ancestry.com.
Ancestry Daily News
