My favorite database so far!

I've never used Ancestry Library before and I am not a genealogy person.  I come from a very small family and my brother and I are the end of the line. For some reason, first cousins twice removed, etc. don't make any sense to me and no matter how many times this is explained it does not stick.   But AL blew me away!  I wish I could have searched this years ago when my parents and the one grandparent who I knew were still alive. 

When I searched for my name, I retrieved 1,629,616 postings.  I wonder why it asks you to put in your middle name and then only searches on the middle initial?  That seems to result in a lot of false drops.  When I added my birth year, the hits were narrowed to 566,396.  Adding more details keeps winnowing down the number of hits.   I did find 2 records which had my name and address correct but had my birth date wrong, not sure why.  Wish I had a more unique name!

I searched for my paternal grandmother in the census and found her in 1920 and 1940.  She was the only grandparent who was alive during my lifetime.  In the 1920 census, my dad was listed as 1 year and 10 months old.  His sister was a teenager (she died of alcoholism and my grandmother never said her name again) and there was another woman (age 21 and from Canada) listed.  I think she might have been a servant; I can't read what is listed in the column that would be the occupation.  I knew they had servants but to see it like this in the census listing was fascinating.

I used the advanced search feature to search for "Maine" and restrict to "photos and maps."  This was the only way I could find to do this; I did not see a tab.  I got over a million hits.  I pressed the "r" key to refine and added Carlton Wood, my grandfather-in-law, and got 7,284.  There were some cool photos, some from the Camden High School yearbook (he was principal there in the 50s and I am doing this assignment right now in the Camden Public Library). 

All in all, I think this is an amazing database and the only drawback is that one cannot search it from home.