Thursday, April 30, 2009

Genealogy Journal - 04/30/09

This was an interesting day - I got a lot done toward my 5/16 presentation about Ancestry.com and then found a puzzling quirk in Ancestry searches.

After reading email and blogs and Twitter, I posted What Should I Say About Ancestry.com? thinking my readers might be able to help me out some. The response has been civil and helpful and interesting - I hope A.com reads it. I then wrote A Victorian House in San Diego - turned into a box for the Carnival of genealogy, but set it to post late in the afternoon. I got cleaned up, and checked in on Facebook, and Ancestry new databases (not much new US Content recently), had lunch and headed out for my walk with George on the bayfront. I was home by 1 p.m.

It was time to get serious about my Ancestry 101 presentation, so I made a format for the presentation, and over the next four hours I had almost 50 slides done - mostly screen captures from the Family Tree and Search sections of Ancestry. I still have plenty to do for the other sections. I will need to go back over it and highlight things, but I'm pleased with the progress so far. I'll be OK as long as A.com doesn't change their page format on me in the next two weeks! I found a quirk in the New vs. Old Search and captured some screens to test it out. At 5 p.m. I went in and watched the news, read the paper, and we had dinner.

I was back at the keyboard at 6:30, and wrote Ancestry.com Quirk - Different Results for Old Search and New Search. I tested it again and the problem is still there. Strange! Then it was time for the Padres game ... we went ahead 3-1 and 5-4, but the Dodgers beat up our bullpen to win it 8-5. We're now 11-11. I was back at the keyboard at 10:20 p.m., read everything, checked the A.com quirk (still there) and wrote this post.

Genealogy today was 8.5 hours - 0.5 hour doing email, 0.5 hour reading blogs, 0.5 hour on Twitter/Facebook, 2.0 hours writing blog posts, 1.0 hour checking out Ancestry problems, and 4.0 hours working on the A.com presentation.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good luck on your Ancestry.com presentation! You might find my article on using the census records at Ancestry.com interesting.

Your daily schedule of genealogy activities is inspiring!

Stephanie at the Irish Genealogical blog