Ancestry Press: A First Look

Ancestry's new online publishing service, Ancestry Press, is now out of beta, so today I spent some time checking it out. The service offers easy to use templates and tools to help you showcase your genealogy research, including documents, charts and photos.

You can get to AncestryPress in two ways: 1) by clicking on the Publish tab from Ancestry.com or 2) from within your online Ancestry Member tree. Yes, you need to upload your tree to Ancestry.com before you are able to use AncestryPress. You can make it private, however, so that only invited family members and/or friends will be able to view your tree. Be sure to disable any pop-up blockers (that tripped me up the first time I visited)!

To begin, click on the Get Started Button and then choose to either create a new book using templates, or to create one from scratch. After some experimentation, I decided that I prefer to create a book from scratch and then choose the specific templates which I'd like to work with. This is definitely a matter of personal preference. Either way, AncestryPress will bring in all of the names, records and images you've attached to your tree. If you choose to go the template route, you'll be asked to choose the format of the pedigree chart and a starting person for your book. Ancestry will then gather information from your tree and create a bunch of pages based on what information it finds in your tree, including pedigree charts, family group sheets, timelines, and specific record pages for military records, census records, immigration records, etc.

Once your tree is loaded, it is time to begin editing. The pre-loaded templates are fairly generic, but if you're even a little crafty it isn't too hard to make them look nice. You can choose from dozens of embellishments -- stickers, tags, frames, quotes and special journaling areas -- or add embellishments of your own. You can also highlight any text and choose from a number of fonts and colors. Backgrounds include a number of parchment papers, plus military, family and other specialty background images.

Photos can be rotated, cropped and dragged around the page. You can even choose from a variety of frames. Once you drag an image onto the page, a menu bar appears on top of the image, and several icons surround the image. The little yellow boxes on the sides of each image allow you to crop. The square in the lower-right corner resizes the image. Click and drag the circle in the upper-left corner to rotate the image. The menu bar includes zoom and pan features, and allows you to change the photo to black and white or sepia-tone if you wish. If you're unsure of what an icon does, just hover over it with your mouse.

I've only had time to play with a few pages so far, but I'm starting to find it fun. It's a lot more work to make the pages look nice than I first thought it would. The basic templates created automatically are a little dull. But they work well enough for those who don't really like to get creative. And for those who do -- especially those who love digital scrapbooking -- AncestryPress appears to provide a lot of promise.

When completed, books can be professionally printed, or you can print the pages yourself at home. This makes AncestryPress a fun option for creating quick, frameable gifts!

There are a few downsides that I've noticed so far. You will require a fast Internet connection such as cable or DSL. I wouldn't recommend AncestryPress over dial-up (and neither do they). There is also no easy way that I could find to import new records or names from your tree into an already existing project. There also aren't a lot of ideas for creating creative pages, but I'm sure as with scrapbooking, there will be plenty of ideas popping up all over soon enough. The enlarged census image I used in my above example came from an idea posted on the AncestryPress blog.

Look for more detailed feedback and example pages as I play around some more. And please feel free to click on "comments" below to share your own feedback if you have any experience with AncestryPress.