HeritageQuest Census Images

By Anonymous on Sat, 03/21/2015 - 01:45

Forums

I subscribe to Ancestry.com but used HeritageQuest for quite a number of my citations for images of the US Federal Census when the image at Ancestry.com was illegible or other issues existed.

The images on HeritageQuest are now being sourced by Ancestry.  The images that HeritageQuest had provided *are no longer available*.

This is a concern because:

  1. Someone following a citation to HeritageQuest will *not* end up viewing the image being cited
  2. Copies of images downloaded from HeritageQuest no longer represent what's on HeritageQuest

I checked a few images that I'd downloaded from HeritageQuest and found that the image now on HeritageQuest was actually better than what they had in the past.

My census citations are per EE 6.19 - 6.31 and include the date I viewed online images.  I plan to review the images now on HeritageQuest and update the date viewed just to be careful.  (That may not be absolutely necessary, of course.)

Anyway, I thought others that use those EE citations would like this heads-up!

Brian Gross

 

Submitted byEEon Sun, 03/22/2015 - 16:53

Brian, issues like this with web providers is one reason why EE has gone through 3 editions already!

That said, the basic format still stands. The issue is how the change is handled by researchers who create long-term databases and have hundreds or thousands of reference notes to Heritage Quest. Ideally,

  1. We should go through our databases immediately and add a note to each existing HQ citation to say that we viewed HQ's often-superior images prior to its adoption of Ancestry.com images.
  2. Beginning now, new citations to HQ should carry a note that HQ is now using Ancestry.com images and search-eng.

We know not what might transpire in the future. The marriage of these two companies (or, at least the current hook-up) may well not last. It's not inconceivable that HQ may return to using its own images and search engine. As I go forward, I definitely want my own work-in-progress to indicate which versions I used for a piece of data.