A drop-down menu on the new Search page allows you to limit your search to ancestors from a specific ethnicity or nationality (e.g., African American, Australian, Canadian, English, French, etc.). When you choose a specific nationality or ethnicity, we will give the collections that we know to have data pertinent to that nationality or ethnicity a little more weight in your search results.

For example, let's say you are searching for Robert Jones and you know he was born in England about 1830, but he lived most of his life in Canada. Our search engine will find many matching records for Robert Jones in England, Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere. If you choose to prioritize Canadian collections, we know that those will be more likely to contain records you want. So if multiple records match your search equally well, we will list records from our Canadian collections first.

In addition to prioritizing collections, choosing an ethnicity/nationality helps us know whether to apply a different soundex algorithm or use different name dictionaries to better find approximate matches for the names you entered.

As we acquire more collections for different countries we’ll continue to add options to this drop-down menu. This new, downloadable Toolbar from Ancestry.com adds a powerful new element to your family history research. With this free tool at your fingertips, you can quickly and easily search the web for information about the people you’re researching, attach online links, images, and text to individuals in your tree, and instantly access your tree and Ancestry.com Quicklinks.