Have you ever struggled to find records on Ancestry.com? Well, it might be because you're
not using the Card Catalog to its fullest. Today we're gonna change that. Howdy, I'm Devin Noel
Lee with Family History Fanatics, where we love to help you climb your family tree and have a
lot of fun along the way. If you're new here, be sure to check the links in the description
for our free guides as well as other videos that will help you know how to use Ancestry better.
So let's talk about the Card Catalog. Now I don't remember actually using a Card Catalog
except when I was in elementary school to look up books in the local library.
But the Card Catalog on Ancestry functions pretty much the same way. It is a list of
records from around the world that can help you document your ancestors. Well, why are you going
to use the Card Catalog? Ancestry has a ton of search forms. Just use that! Well, that's what
I thought when I was a baby genealogist. That is, the more records that Ancestry puts online,
they can't always put your results in the search form in the global search forms. Instead, if you
will drill down to a specific collection. You can either browse them (because they're not indexed),
or you can search them and just be looking at that collection for that location and that time period.
Because genealogy, after all, is about time and place. So the first thing we're going to do
is we're going to get this one out of the way. We're going to type in your surname.
Now, most often, you go to the Card Catalog to look for collections and then look for a
name. However, some of you fortunate few have published genealogies about your surnames and
your relatives. And so doing a certain search might be the one that you need to do. Just get
it out of the way. And let me show you how. So I'm going to type in my maiden name Geiszler
and click search. I don't find a single Geiszler. Alright, well, let's try some name variation. It
was often g-e-i-s-s-l-e-r. Give that a go. And no. Well, you can also try a wild card search.
And no. My family just didn't write a lot of, uh, published histories and send them to a place where
Ancestry could access them. So this is one of the reasons why I say don't look for people first.
But let's actually look for a more successful last name. And let's try Townsend in honor of
my civil war ancestor that I've written about before. And here, you can see a number of
different entries. So there's the Townsend, Haggerty, Zimmerman, Baker, Parker, and Goddard
families. I can click on that. And once again, this is not something that's going to show up in
a search form- the global search form. That if we went to search all collections and then typed
in the name Townsend. That's not going to work out too well in our search forms. But instead,
we can click on this image, and we can begin to read this 21-page document.
The better way to use the Card Catalog is instead of looking for a person, or a surname is to look
for a location and a date and then filter down. You can also use a variety of different
keywords to filter the over 30,000 databases that Ancestry has with billions of names on it.
So to access the Card Catalog, we're going to click on search from any page on the website and
click on Card Catalog. But wait. But wait. But wait. But wait, wait. I know you want to jump
into the Card Catalog. But I have to tell you this first. Before you go to the Card Catalog, have a
question in mind. It's next impossible to find something if you don't know what you're looking
for. Because again, genealogy is about time and location. So know what it is your question is.
When was Charles born? When did Frank serve in the military? Was Bob in ever in the poor house or in
a jail situation? Know your question and then dive into the Card Catalog. Once you're there,
I actually recommend bypassing this stuff first. So I'm looking for a place
in Louisiana or Lou-si-ana, depending on where you're from. And I'm looking for Natchitoches,
it's very similar to Nacogdoches here we in Texas. But it's spelled slightly different and definitely
said differently. So we're going to go to North America, or we can jump to the United States. Then
we're going to scroll down and find Louisiana. So now we're going to go into the parish of
Natchitoches. See quite a mouthful, um. It's actually a parish in Louisiana. If you were in
other parts of the United States, it would be a county. So we're going to click on this parish.
And unfortunately, Natchitoches only has one record collection. However, I can click into
it. And there's several things I can do now. You can search using the search form. And many of us
want to fill in every detail that is here on this forum. But I'm going to recommend that you don't.
Now I highly recommend you use keywords when you're looking for something. Maybe you're looking
for a judge or a military officer, or the county clerk. You could type that in here as a keyword.
But watch what happens when I type in Robert Durr, both names. They do appear side by side
on records, but Ancestry is telling me that it can't find it. So instead,
I'm actually going to take off either the surname or the first name and repeat this
search. And then we're going to actually find Robert Durr. So there is a Robert Durr,
a Robert Durr. And we'll just go right in, and we're going to see that there is criminal cases,
um, a ledger. And this tells me where I can go actually look up that information.
So be sure to get into the Card Catalog. Because you never know what you're going to find.
Now let's say we can't find our records through the search forms. It's just not showing up.
Well, another thing we can do is we can use the browse feature. The table of contents feature.
And we can come in here and see the clerk of the court. And you can find out information.
So that's the first way to use the Card Catalog the search. The next way is to go by categories.
Not every collection is kept at the level that you think it should be. So
searching by categories can be a lot of fun. We can look at newspapers and periodicals. And we can
see a lot of great collections to explore. Such as this collection the US American Protective League
newsletters. You can click on that because how many of us would have thought to look for this?
We have the information about it. And this is a browse-only collection, as you can see on the
right here. So there is not a search form, and that's why searching by categories is
pretty helpful. Because we never really would have found this collection had we not
done it that way. So we can then click into the browse images. And now we can see this newsletter.
The bulletin of news and better methods issued by the American Protective League.
Before we continue, I want to personally invite you to participate in our Family History Fanatics
live streams. We go live every other Friday here on YouTube to help answer all of your research
and DNA questions. So join a DNA Q&A. And then if you want to go to the next step, consider becoming
a member of FHF Xtra, our channel members here on YouTube. You can get the really fun emojis to use
during premieres as well as live chats. But you can also have access to a lot of webinars that
we have every month. Now there are two fields that you can complete- title and keywords. Now
I recommend that you use the keywords over the title. Simply because the word that you're looking
for has to be in the title. But a lot of times, the word you're looking for isn't in the title,
but it's in the description of the collection. And so it's better to actually just use the keywords.
Because you're going to have more search results so you can type in a lot of different, um, search
terms. So let's put type in "slave" and see what comes up. You have South African slaves, and free
blacks records something from Brazil. From the slave emancipation records from Washington, D.C.
Something more specific in Mississippi. There's a lot of great collections here that you can explore
by just typing in that keyword. And then, you can filter by location or by category.
Another term to give a try is "narratives." I like narratives because they're really about
personal accounts and eyewitnesses of people from a specific time and location. So here's narratives
of early Carolina from 1650 to 1780. You can do a search form, but then you can also click on
the browse feature and kind of read it as if you were reading chapters of a book. And you can get
a brief description of the province of Carolina from 1666. And now you can find some historical
context to both understand the record collection availability for Carolina in 1666. But you can
also use that to help write your family stories. Now another cool thing to do on the Card Catalog
is, if you're just curious, one day is to scroll through and look at what was new. There's Boeheim,
Germany deaths. Westminster, London Non-Conformist Baptism records. That's really helpful. Dakota
naturalization records and on and on and on. This is where you can find out what Ancestry has
been releasing. Now there is another collection that's part of the Card Catalog, but you can't
find it on the Card Catalog page. And that's the special collections that Ancestry has curated
to access that. You need actually go to search all collections. And then on the right, you need to,
not this special collections that- that's not to be confused with these special collections. So for
African-American collections, American Indian the, um, Jewish family history, New York state records,
and Quaker collection. Make sure that you come down here even though it would be really nice if
it was over on the Card Catalog page. I keep searching, and I'm not finding those special
collections for those groups if that would pertain to you. Yeah, they're not showing up
here. Now that you have found your records, you need to stop. Because you need to actually go
read the collection record page. I can't tell you the number of times when I first
got my Ancestry subscription, and I skipped this step. And I spent so much time looking
for my relatives only to find out that the years that I needed were not part of that collection.
Don't do that! Don't stress yourself out! Don't get mad at Ancestry thinking they don't have
your records for your ancestors. Read the collection page because they might also have
some search strategies that you hadn't thought of to help you access that collection better.
So after you've done that, then you can go search. And once you have searched and discovered an
ancestor, then you need to save that document to the family tree. Now sometimes it's really easy
you find the record, and there's a button that's a "Save to the Tree" or "Save to your Source Box."
The other thing you might have to actually copy the URL. And then go to your tree and add an extra
event. And that's a discussion for another day and another time. But the most important thing
is to save what you found to your family tree. Now, if you want to be a fantastic genealogist,
don't just leave your information on the Ancestry member tree. Go get those URLs and then source
citations and put them into a genealogy software program, or go put them on other trees- like
FamilySearch, Wikitree, and the like. Because the more places you have your tree and the more
documentation you share with others, inviting them to check out the actual record on Ancestry,
the better and more accurate your research becomes. And the more people stop making
huge mistakes because you found a record that someone else hadn't discovered before.
So dive into the Card Catalog, and then let me know what you found.
I can't wait to talk to you all about the cool discoveries on Ancestry. If you want some more
tips and tricks on how to use Ancestry.com. Be sure you check out the video up here. And if
you're ready for something new, try this video right here. Did I say right way? I meant better