I am a little bit of a history geek (probably thanks to my
history teacher mother); I love to find out stories behind places I visit and
the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are is set to record on my TV!
I discovered the family tree creating app, Ancestry, after
it was featured by Apple as a 'Best New' app last year, and, having tried to
research my family tree online before, thought I'd give it a go.
The app is linked with ancestry.com's online database but
you don't need to create an account on there, instead you can just use the app
which I've found a lot easier for basic searches. I have been pleasantly
surprised with the amount of information that can be found. I love that you can
actually see handwritten documents such as marriage certificates of family
members one hundred years ago; it really brings the app to life. These records
can be bought as an in-app-purchase if you'd like to save them.
The app is exactly what you'd expect and want from a family
tree research app. Once you've added in as many details about yourself and
family members as you can, Ancestry searches databases to generate 'hints' to
help you find out more. These hints are my favourite feature of the app; they
bring up a number of records that could be linked to your tree. You then need
to go through these to check against what you've already found to see whether
they are a match - it really helps you go back even further without too many
headaches!
The colours are pretty dull but then Ancestry's branding is
brown and green so they've brought that onto the app. To personalise it a
little more there is an option for adding images but, as you go further back in
history, it's very hard to find images to go with names so I've not used that
function. A nice feature is that you can start more than one family tree within
the app so if you'd like to do some research for someone else it's easy to do
so.
I have a small family and unfortunately didn't have a lot of
information about past family members on my father's side but the Ancestry app
helped me go back over 220 years, across England, Scotland and Wales to find my
great-great-great-great-grandmother (wait for it)... Jane! We didn't know we
had quite so many Jane's in our family but it's nice to have that connection
all the way back to 1791.
I would certainly recommend Ancestry as an easy way to
research into your past on-the-go.
Score: 9/10
I love...
- The simple layout and seamless menu
- Being able to delve deep into the records to discover more than names and dates - occupation was my favourite to learn!
I'd like to...
- Share my tree with others, for example, my dad would like to join my tree and add relatives to discover more
- Get advice from Ancestry once there are no hints left (I'm at that point now)... it's disappointing to hit a wall!
Jane x
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