How to include links to sources, digitalized by ancestry?

Question

I am learning how to include sources in a proper way in WikiTree. As a historian I try to quote the actual, origin source and the archive first. I think that an online link without reliable information about the source itself is not accurate enough. But of course it is very useful and important to add a link if a source can be found online, for instance at Familysearch, Ancestry, szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl, Matricula Online or Archion (for German Protestant parish registers). Some of these sites have a paywall (like ancestry and archion), others not and I always try to add the information "Paywall" (gebührenpflichtig) to the link.

In the case of ancestry I just realized that the links to digitalized sources at ancestry might not be very helpful in a number of cases. One and the same "collection" and actual source/document (in this case German civil birth, marriage and death records) appears with a different link, depending on the county in which you have booked the ancestry package. ancestry.com and ancestry.uk links do not work for me although I have a bigger package booked at ancestry.de - and my ancestry.de link to the same document might not work for others, like decendents of the people this record deals with who live in the USA.

Any idea or tool how to deal with this problem?

Kind regards and Merry Christmas to all of you, Jens

P.S. 1:
And after ancestry do not seem to offer permalinks (is this correct?) it is as well a question which format a link to a source digitalized by ancestry should have:
www.ancestry.xx/imageviewer/collections/...
or www.ancestry.xx/discoveryui-content/view/...

P.S: If there are legal, reliable sites on which the digital version of a certain source would be accessable without a paywall, we should prefer this. For records of a great number of civil register records and parish registers from Pomerania/Pommern, Silesia/Schlesien and other regions within the borders of today`s Poland szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl is a good example and there are other examples for records in the Czech Republic and other European countries.

Comments

You can create Ancestry "sharing links" that allow anyone to view the image.

The WikiTree Sourcer extension automatically includes them in citations. More info on sharing links here.

Regarding permalinks there is a WikiTree external link template to use to link to Ancestry records. The WikiTree Sourcer extension also automatically uses this rather than the links in the formats that you mention.

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Hi Rob!

Thanks to you, I learned about sharing links and how to create and use them. A very big Thank You!

Answer 1

Dear Jens,

have you tried the WikiTree Sourcerer? You will find info and the link for download at the end of the Tree apps (in the "Find" pull-down menu). It automatically generates share links (nothing that would make a historian jump around happy, but it gets the people to the source) for a lot of genealogical pages and seems to work around the problem you described (at least I have been able to open most of the links in other profiles that have been created with the Sourcerer) and others seem to be able to open mine  (not for the Allenstein digital copies, for those I just copy the link to the register])

Using it is easy - first open for example the person profile in your Ancestry account, then search with the sourcerer, open the source and then make the sourcerer build an inline citation (or a narrative or just a source citation).

I hope this will solve the problem - kind regards and have a merry Christmas as well!

Heike :-)

Comments

Dear Heike!

Thank you! I did not know the WikiTree Sourcerer and a number of other great apps yet. This is certainly very helpful to find sources for a certain profile on the provided internet sites.

But I am afraid that it does not help me to solve the problem of a number of different ancestry links to different sites for the same record. As far as I understand it links (to exactely the same collection, record and digital image) created with the German ancestry account could only be openend by others with this type of ancestry account while liks created with an ancestry,com account could only be opened by others with an ancestry.com account.

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With the Sourcer app you can right click (or ctrl click) on a link and it will open in the domain that you're subscribed to.

When you click and the menu appears, it's "open in new tab", right at the bottom of the menu.

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Also the WikiTree Browser Extension has a feature called "Redirect External Links". This will automatically update the WikiTree profile page for you to point to where your Ancestry or FMP subscription is.

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Thank you Rob!

There is really still a lot to discover me me, a great number of interestung and hreloful apps. I appreciate the meritious work so many people have done of that!

I have added the WikiTree Browser Extension to my Firefox browser, added the "Redirect External Links" to ancestry.de and it really works. Great! Thank you! What a wonderful community.

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These two apps (browser extension and sourcer) have absolutely revolutionised my Wikitree experience.