Saturday 17 October 2020

Now this is what I call an update: 209 million records!

A few weeks ago Irish Genealogy News announced the launch of a new collection on Ancestry (see blogpost). It highlighted the arrival of the Newspapers.com Marriage Index, 1800s-1999, created from details extracted from titles held in the Ancestry-owned Newspapers.com database.

I thought it would be an extremely useful collection for Irish family historians to know about, as marriage announcements often contain important genealogical information not found elsewhere. And with 11 million entries, there seemed a fair chance of locating an Irish immigrant ancestor or his/her descendents.

So, when I spotted an update to the collection in Ancestry's What's New listing, I was keen to see how many extra records had joined the Index.

Only a cool 209,316,224!

The new total of records in this collection is now 220,784,630, making it the ninth largest in Ancestry's database of historical records. (The Newspapers.com Obituary Index, for the same period is the second largest with 810million.)