Is Ancestry Missing Your Ancestors?

It’s so frustrating to look for a record on Ancestry — a record that you just KNOW exists — and you can’t find it. No matter how many ways you try spelling the name, you just can’t find it.

The issue might not be in how you’re searching. Here’s how to tell whether or Ancestry has the record that you’re looking for in your genealogy.

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Or watch the video (or scroll below to keep reading):

I see it happen all the time — people will do a search on Ancestry, not get the results they expect, and then one of two things happens. They will either get frustrated with themselves — “I must be searching wrong!” — or they will make the wrong conclusion about their ancestor. “I didn’t find her marriage record where I expected, so she must have gotten married somewhere else.”

It’s true that our ancestors sometimes did things like run off to another place to get married…. And sometimes we do need to try different search strategies. But one of the biggest reasons that your search results are turning up a big fat zero is that Ancestry doesn’t have the record.

Ancestry doesn’t have every record. They don’t even have everything that’s online.

The problem is that it isn’t always obvious what Ancestry doesn’t have, especially if you’ve been doing searches from the main search page.

So how can you tell when it’s a matter of needing to search differently versus Ancestry not having the records that you need? There are two places you want to look.

The Ancestry Card Catalog

The first is Ancestry’s Card Catalog. (Yes, they’re a website. They still call it the Card Catalog, though.) This will let you know exactly what collections Ancestry has for a certain location, so you can see whether or not they have collections that cover what you’re looking for.

You get to the Card Catalog by clicking on Search at the top of the page on Ancestry, then clicking “Card Catalog.” How Ancestry names its collections can help us see what collections are specific for that location, because the title includes the place name.

What if we’re trying to find a death certificate for an ancestor who died in Missouri in 1964? We can go into the Card Catalog, enter Missouri in the title field, and click Search. Now we get a list of all of Ancestry’s collections that have “Missouri” in the title. If we want, we can use the filters on the lefthand side of the page to focus the list further by category and/or date.

Scrolling through the list of collections, we can see that Ancestry has these two collections: “Missouri, U.S., Death Certificates, 1910-1962” and “Missouri, U.S., Death Records, 1968-2015.” So, while other collections might have information about the person’s burial or maybe their obituary, Ancestry has a gap in their coverage of Missouri death certificates; unfortunately, that death in 1964 falls in that gap.

Your ancestor very well could have died in Missouri in 1964, but no matter how you search, you’re not going to find his or her death certificate on Ancestry.

A Surprising Way to Use Ancestry’s “Browse This Collection” Feature

The Card Catalog is useful, but it isn’t the only place to check what Ancestry doesn’t have.

Let’s switch up our research and now we’re looking for the death record of an ancestor who died in Adair County, Missouri in 1905. Using the Card Catalog, we see there’s a collection called, “Missouri, U.S., Death Records, 1850-1931.” Sounds promising!

But doing a search, we’re not finding what we’re looking for. When you’re on a collection page on Ancestry, scroll below the search form; there’s sometimes an “About” section that gives more information about the collection. But when the collection has images, you can get an even better idea what’s in the collection by using the Browse feature.

If you click on the “County” dropdown, you might be surprised that the first county listed is “Barry.” That means this collection doesn’t have anything for Adair County (or any other “A” county).

What about Butler County? If you choose Butler County, you’ll see that the collection only includes 1883-1893 — much less coverage than the 1850-1931 in the collection title!

So why is collection called “Missouri, U.S., Death Records, 1850-1931”? Because somewhere in the collection there is at least one record that dates to 1850 and at least one that dates to 1931. Ancestry isn’t the only website to name their databases this way. In fact, it isn’t unheard of for archives to label a collection this way, though most of them will have a note saying what years the bulk of the collection is.

Save Yourself Some Genealogical Frustration

There are times when we do need to switch up our searches — but it doesn’t matter how you search if the website doesn’t have the record to begin with! Save yourself some frustration in your research and explore what Ancestry doesn’t have.