I searched for my exact name and birth year and, being a privacy bug, I am relieved to say I got 9 hits and none of them were about me. Even looking for voter and census data, I got no hits.
Searching for my grandparents, I found better results if I left off years from the search. I ran through a number of searches with no results, even though I know they filled out census forms and voted. When I left off either years or state names, I was able to come up with some good results.
Strangely, I routinely get good results when I search for people in the 18th and 19th centuries. Perhaps because there are not as many records to search through. It is interesting to me that I can get marriage records for an ancestor from 1804 more readily than I can for one from 1920.
Keyword searching South Dakota under the Photos and Maps tab brought up 5 categories of photograph collections (including 3,000+ high school yearbooks!) and 4 categories comprising 150 maps. To actually view a map, I need to install an Ancestry Viewer, which I am not permitted to do on my school computer, but even so, this is another great resource!
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Hi, Avid, we're glad for the discoveries you made. You can see that genealogists & historians really value these resources. Actually, you don't have to download the viewer to see the images. The next sentence says something like "to view without installing the viewer, click here" with a link. You are so right that the more general searching yields better results, even if it means sifting through records that are not about the person for whom you are looking. Thanks for your comments!
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