I saw a comment online recently that made me realise that not everyone knows how to page forward through census records on the Ancestry website.
While it is obvious how to navigate between the individuals shown together in a single household since each person’s name is a hyperlink, what may be less obvious it how to move to the next or previous households. That’s what this post is about.
I cover this in my August 2021 Family History Month – Scottish Research presentation, but I thought it might be useful to pull out the details of just that technique into a blog post.
To show you the behaviour that forms the basis of this technique, go to any Ancestry census household and select the person who is the head of the household, that is the first person in the list. Look in the browser address bar. You will see a URL that looks something like this:
https://www.ancestry.co.uk/discoveryui-content/view/253039:1101
Take note of the highlighted part of your URL, that is, the number up to the colon ‘:’ character.
Now select each of the household members in turn and watch what happens to the number in that highlighted portion.
You should see that it increments by one each time.
So now we have everything we need to navigate to next or previous households.
Navigating to the next household
If you select the last member of a household and then manually edit the URL in the address bar to increase it by one, you will now be looking at the first person in the next household.
Navigating to the previous household
If you select the first member of a household and then manually edit the URL in the address bar to decrease it by one, you will now be looking at the last person in the previous household.