Hi, Sara, I'm quite experienced at searching ancestry. Are you searching ancestry.ca or ancestry.com? If you give me the information that you already have, I would be happy to give it a try and see if I can help. (If I find something, I can share with you what worked.) I also find ancestry frustrating because of the inadequacy of their search strategies, which I used to design when I was working. I'm pretty sure they have tried to design their system to encourage beginners who would be discouraged it they had no hits at all. Do you know how to use ancestry's card catalog to locate data bases specific to your locations? Shirley ------------------------------ Message: 5 Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2011 08:50:51 -0500 From: sara5d <sara5d@optonline.net> Subject: [ NB ] Navigating Ancestry To: "NewBrunswick@rootsweb.com" NEWBRUNSWICK@rootsweb.com Since our list is quiet, I would like to ask for some help. I have a full Ancestry subscription, but I am having a devil of a time navigating. I can put a full name in with the birth year, with state or province. It gives me all sorts of totally unrelated resources. These resources are not alphabetical. It becomes a nightmare to search. If I use a middle initial (instead of the full middle name), it gives me everyone with the middle initial; in spite of a totally different first name or even surname. Also, if I go in a later time, it no longer gives me what I already knew was there (from a previous visit). How can I refine my searches to the place I expect them to be? And is there a way to save resources (census, trees etc) so that I can go directly back to them? Seems like I must already know the full name, birth/death date and place, plus who they married, in order to search. If I knew that already, I wouldn't need Ancestry. Thanks for any and all help. Message: 6 Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2011 10:25:25 -0400 From: John Cordes <John.Cordes@dal.ca> Subject: Re: [ NB ] Navigating Ancestry To: newbrunswick@rootsweb.com Here are a couple of things I do; they may or may not be of any use to you. One idea is to selectively set various fields to be "Exact". You can even put something like mos* in the surname field and still set it to be "Exact" rather than default. It's the Default which allows for so many variations to appear. The other idea which I find quite useful on occasion is to enter something in the Keywords box -- probably half-way down the screen after all the name details. For example I might put "nova scotia" (incl. the quotes) in the Keywords box, and sometimes force it by checking the Exact box alongside. Hope this helps, John Cordes Halifax, Nova Scotia