Hello! I think it was Christa Cowan who recommended checking the "What's New" section periodically for new collections that might apply to my ancestors. But when a collection like "U.S. City Directories, 1821-1989 (Beta)" says "Updated", I can't find where it tells me what specific city directories have been added lately. It's pretty cumbersome to individually check each town where my ancestors lived to see if a new year has been added. Am I missing where it tells me that?

Nope, you're not missing a thing. It's called The Ancestry Guessing Game.

Ancestry almost never indicates what the update is, unless it is a big one.

In the case of the Beta City Directories, however, this represents a major improvement over the old city directories database. There are many more city directories (especially in the 1930's - 40's time period). Also I have had MUCH better success at locating someone in a city directory. I'm not a techie, but I know that the process of making the city directories searchable has been much improved.

I suggest that you try your searches again. You can just use the search facility and enter your ancestor's name and city/state. You should find more entries than you did previously.

The Beta city directories database is especially good for finding 1940 addresses so you can search 1940 census, but there are lots more earlier years that have been added too. Worth the time to try it out in my opinion. I've had great success with it.

Sharon

The Beta City Directories also are good for giving a spouse name (for instance, someone who married/remarried after the 1930 census), and for helping to narrow a likely date of a death - I have had several where I could get a death date down to a window of a year or two, because the couple would be listed together in one year, and then a year or two after it would be just the wife (with the notation of "Wid. of __").

Don't get me wrong, I do really love what I've found in this collection. Just wish I knew what the Update was. Oh well. Thanks for your help!

Ancestry almost never indicates what the update is, unless it is a big one.
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I would consider the 1880 census a "big one," but nary a word about what was updated.

When ancestry doesn't tell you how something has been "updated", it usually means that they didn't add anything, they just redid some of it because they had made a mess of it the first time around! No kidding. For example, everyone knows how awful the census indexes were. In this case, "updated" means they had some volunteers go through and redo the indexing. After all, census is census. There will never be any more of the 1880 census, it's over and done, and was complete the first time around. It was just the index that was horrific. So now it is called "updated", LOL.

Another example is the Civil War pension index. For many years, ancestry claimed, on their database explanation, that 10% of the cards were "missing". The truth is that they scanned those cards directly from the NARA microfilm, and none of them were "missing" from the microfilm (I use that microfilm all the time at NARA). Cards that were very dark or very light on the microfilm did not transfer over because the people who did the images the first time didn't know how to use the scanning equipment, apparently, or didn't want to take the time to adjust it properly for each image. Thus many images were not readable, and if an image was not readable, they just chucked it and pretended that it didn't exist at all, and didn't even index the name. There were actually about 30% of the cards missing from ancestry's database, not 10% as they claimed. After many years of me and others complaining to NARA about this (since they gave a partner agreement with ancestry), ancestry has FINALLY redone that index.

Now you know why they don't tell you what has been "updated"--it would be too embarrassing!