Navigating Places on Ancestry’s New Search Page

Ancestry.com has post­ed a new search page: http://search.ancestry.com/search/

The search itself does not seem to have changed. I still get some strange results, includ­ing names or locales that seem unre­lat­ed to the search I entered.

What inter­ests me, how­ev­er, is that the map at the bot­tom of this search page leads to a lot of loca­tion-spe­cif­ic data. Ances­try, in a  blog entry enti­tled “Browse the Place Pages,” claims that they have cre­at­ed thou­sands of place pages. As you would expect, these pages include cat­e­go­rized links to record col­lec­tions that relate to the place (such as Cen­sus and Vot­er Lists, Vital Records, Mil­i­tary Records). But they also con­tain links to maps, atlases, and gazetteers; ref­er­ences, dic­tio­nar­ies, and almanacs; and sto­ries, mem­o­ries, and his­to­ries.

The pages also let you focus your nav­i­ga­tion on par­tic­u­lar localites, such as coun­ties with­in a state, and some of these have their own place pages.

The tabs “His­to­ry” and “Resources” pro­vide his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion about the locale and resources for research­ing in this area. While I will not like­ly stop using Wikipedia for place infor­ma­tion when I research (see the Vir­ginia page at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia), this is often a genealog­i­cal­ly spe­cif­ic set of infor­ma­tion that will help while I’m research­ing at Ances­try, and else­where. I wel­come this new locale data.