07 September 2006

Ellis Island on Ancestry.com

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Walter Mossberg evaluated the upgraded tools at Ancestry.com for building a family tree. I found it interesting that, according to Walt:
The company says the Ellis Island data are coming within months.
A while back, Ellis Island disallowed downloading of manifests. Will Ancestry be making them available for downloading or storing? That would be much better than the tacked-together-screenshot method I am currently using.

Walt's columns on technology are always open about the pros and cons of a product and clearly detailed. He writes about the tools he reviews as if he were a novice. Indeed - he was impressed by the "Family Facts" that appeared while he was searching on Ancestry. He summed up his experience thusly:

Ancestry.com is a rich site that uses a sensible layout and encourages
learning.

Check out the tree-building tools yourself at Ancestry Ancestry.com

2 comments:

Steve Danko said...

Yes, indeed, you can download copies of the Ellis Island Manifests from Ancestry.com. You can also choose to print them out directly from Ancestry.com, another funtion that is disabled on the Ellis Island website.

This makes my like a whole lot easier.

Anonymous said...

Your comment on screen shots prompted me to leave a note. I used screen shots for my research too but recently found an application called SnagIt that captures screens better. It has a feature that allow you to scroll down the screen to capture data that is out of the current view. We use it at work (I do software testing). There may be other similiar tools available that are free. SnagIt is about $30.