The card catalogue can provide you with quick access to records from specific collections, locations, and time periods. It’s most useful when you’re looking for a certain record and want to search within a particular database. For help searching internationally, see our article about searching by location.
Accessing the card catalogue
From any page on Ancestry®, click the Search tab and select Card Catalogue.
Go to the card catalogue
Searching with titles or keywords
On the Card Catalogue page, look in the top-left corner for the Title and Keyword(s) fields. If you know the name (or part of the name) of the collection you want to search, type it into the Title field. Searching by “1911 Census,” for example, will bring up search results that include the 1911 England Census. If you don’t know the collection name, enter terms into the Keywords field that are likely to be in the title, such as “1911,” “Wales,” or “Census.”
Use the Keywords field to search by associated terms; for example, the keyword “census” will bring up electoral registers too. Entering more than one term in the Keywords field narrows your results.
Using filters
Narrow your search results using the filters on the left side of the page. Each filter will remove results from your search that don’t match the filter you’ve selected.
You can use more than one filter at once; if you limit your results to military records, for example, you can also filter by location and date.
When filtering by location, selecting a region will produce a list of smaller areas within that region. For example, after selecting United Kingdom from the Filter By Location list, you’ll see a list of smaller locations, and after selecting one of those, you’ll see a list of counties. To filter by date or language, select a decade or language from the lists on the left.
Viewing search results
Up to 25 results are displayed per page. To view more results, click the arrow (or a page number) in the bottom-right corner. To sort search results list by database title, date updated, date added, or record count, click the Sort by menu in the top-right corner.
To search a category in the list, click on the title in the results list. Enter information in the search form that appears.
