Documenting Ancestry.com records

Question

I have been researching on Ancestry.com for years and have a abundant sources from their archives.  Most of these records do not seem to have the info that allows a non-ancestry member to check these sources on-line. I realize this is not acceptable to many.  Can you  suggest a remedy for this problem?

Answer 1

I think Ancestry probably put a lot of thought into how to make their Gedcom generator create citations that would be useless to anyone not using Ancestry, so it is probably an uphill battle. If you code, I think you could probably build an app to scrape Ancestry trees and extract human readable citations, but it would be a fair amount of work and probably violate all sorts of terms of service.

Comments

Not even that easy, unfortunately! It seems to me that the 'links' are actually  just pointers to a database record so we can't get anything useful from the GEDCOM or from the page source. I have in the past written code to extract the name, date and location data from the html but that's about as much as can be done. In Australia we have a name for that, but this is a family site ;)

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A while back, they used to export human readable citations but sometime around 2009 they started obfuscating them. I still have a few old Gedcom backups from 2008, and they're actually cited pretty well. It's understandable though. They probably figured that people would eventually get all they needed and then unsubscribe.

Answer 2

Its not necessary for sources to be verifiable online in order for them to be valid sources -- it just makes it easier.

there are a number of people who *are* ancestry members and can corroborate your sources.

Answer 3

Hi Ruth - I try and look for a source on a free site, such as FamilySearch first. If I don't find one there, I use the Ancestry info - it is still a source. I do try and put the info into the citation so others know what is there:

"Somerset, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1531-1812," database with images, ''Ancestry'' ([https://www.ancestry.com/interactive/60856/engl78030_d-p-kstone-2-1-1_m_00010/4581407 Somerset, England Baptisms] : accessed 16 November 2017), entry for Mary Minson, 7 Jan 1755; citing Anglican Parish Registers. Somerset Archives & Local Studies, South West Heritage Trust, Taunton, England. TEXT: Name: Mary Minson, Event: Baptism, Birth Date 7 Jan 1750, Place: Kingstone, Somerset, England

Comments

Thanks for placing the example.  I have never been sure how much of what I should be noting when using an Ancestry.com source.