Ancestry Academy  > Education  >  Ancestry Search Tips and Tricks: Advanced Techniques

 

In this enthusiastic and highly educational virtual event, Ancestry's Corporate Genealogist Crista Cowan delivers a masterclass on advanced search techniques for family historians. Emphasizing a critical mindset shift—that users are not searching for their ancestors, but rather for the records about their ancestors—Cowan explains how researchers must learn to outsmart the inevitable misspellings and transcription errors made by 19th-century census takers and tired immigration clerks. The primary objective of this session is to empower genealogists who have exhausted basic record hints to break through their research brick walls using tailored, strategic search methodologies.

 

This virtual event is structured as a practical, real-time demonstration, starting with an explanation of how to effectively utilize the auto-search function directly from an Ancestry profile page and use the "browse by collection" feature to sift through hundreds of thousands of results. Crista then dives deep into her favorite tool, the Card Catalog, teaching viewers to apply a less is more iterative search strategy that adds only one piece of information at a time. She provides advanced tutorials on using wild cards (asterisks) to account for mangled surnames and executing highly specific no-name searches to bypass transcription errors entirely. The presentation concludes with an exciting reveal of Ancestry's new AI-powered Full Text Search, which uses handwriting recognition to make unstructured documents, like complex probate files and historical books, fully searchable.

 

Chapters:

- Introduction to Advanced Searching

- Mastering the Auto Search

- The Power of the Card Catalog

- Wild Cards and No-Name Searches

- Unveiling Full Text Search

 

Utilize the Ancestry Card Catalog today to try an iterative no-name search or experiment with wild cards to finally break through your toughest family history brick walls.