Behind the Scenes At Ancestry.com

On today's "Genealogy Insider" we are treated with the following photographs that I thought you would all enjoy.

This is Corporate Headquarters for Ancestry.com.

This is Laryn Brown, head of the Document Preservation department, in front of monitors tracking the scanning.

About a dozen people operate different kinds of copiers and scanners: one photographs books [even turning the individual pages! There is even a scanner as large as an adult!

Diane Haddad wrote:

"More and more often, though, Ancestry.com will digitize paper records on-site at repositories, with digital images sent to headquarters for processing.

Yes, many records are indexed in China and Uganda. Indexers receive months of training in English and whatever language the records are in; they're asked to key exactly what they see, even when a word is misspelled. US employees do quality spot checks and occasionally send back batches of records for re-indexing.

Back in the USA, another team examines records and indexes to “normalize” those misspellings and aberrations in data fields. Say a set of records is from California. The clerks who created the records way back when may have written the state as CA, Cal., Calif. or Calfa. The Ancestry.com staff will add “California” to the index for these records so they come up in customers' California searches. "

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Wow! I was glad to see how well organized and professional Ancestry.com was! - cbh